Ep.41 – Analytics, Predictive Marketing and More with John Wall

Chris Bruno 0:00
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Welcome to the All About Digital Marketing podcast, the show all about digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, brought to you by social ink digital marketing agency specialising in social media and content marketing for brave brands and forward-thinking SMEs. I’m your host, Chris Bruno. And as always, we’re here to bring you the most actionable tips, tricks, tools and insights to help you achieve more when it comes to your digital marketing. Subscribe to the show. And be sure to share with a friend if you found something useful or interesting. You can find all the show notes and more information on christopherb121.sg-host.com

Chris Bruno 
2:05  
John, thank you so much for joining me today.

John Wall:
02:10
Oh, my pleasure to be here.

Chris Bruno:
02:12
So we are living in some turbulent times at the moment, but we’re not gonna get into that too much. But your official title his partner at trust insight for everybody who doesn’t know anything about trust in sight yet, and they’re about to discover Can you give a little bit of an elevator pitch, All the intro. Is it worth to let people know what you do? Yeah,

John Wall:
02:31
sure. So trust insights. We light up dark data where? Data science consultancy that works with marketers. So anybody that needs to know kind of which marketing programmes are working for them or not. Or if you’ve got tonnes of data about your customers over numbers of years and you don’t really know what path they’re customers take to get to you, we can help you figure that kind of stuff out. The company was founded two years ago with Christopher Penn and Katie Ro Bear. They were both that shift communications, doing PR and doing a lot of data science and analysis of PR activities, and they finally decided to break off and start their own company. And I had worked with Christopher Pen for over a dozen years on marketing over coffee. So we worked together and known each other forever. And when they broke off on their own, you know, even within a couple months they reached a point where they’re like, Hey, we could use more help and kind of keeping track of business and getting our message out there to everybody, so I jumped over there to help them out. And yet it’s been fantastic to have a chance to kind of take what was aside hustle thing and make it, Ah, full time job. So it’s been a heck of a

Chris Bruno:
03:34
run. That’s awesome on DH. Just for anyone who doesn’t know is well, marketing over coffee is, I believe your podcast.

John Wall:
03:40
Yes, marketing over coffee. It’s weekly audio programme usually runs about 25 minutes. You know, for most Americans, that’s their average commute in the car, so we kind of built it around that. But we just talk about what’s going on in the world of marketing and tech, and we always try and focus on stuff that you can put to use immediately. You know, there’s a lot of talk on tactics, and then, you know, we’ve been around long enough. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to get to know a lot of marketers. So we have a bunch of authors on now and then to we’ve talked to a lot of the big names and Mark thinks so. But yeah, really, it’s ah, great opportunity for us toe heel to talk with folks who do this stuff that we do every day. And I wanna share the storeys that you know your family or your friends have no interest in hearing.

Chris Bruno:
04:19
Yeah, I like it because these are the sort of conversations that you and I g count over on. Da. A lot of other people just look at us and sort of stare blankly when we start talking about these things. So I’m glad to hear there’s more people like May

John Wall:
04:31
Right now that’s you totally nailed it. You know, you can only go to so many holiday parties and have your relatives glaze over and not be interested in hearing for me at all that you know, you’ve got to find someplace else to tell the Storey because we have great storeys. You know, marketing is so great and that we can do All these campaigns were always trying new stuff, and it’s succeeding or failing spectacularly, and it’s it’s exciting and fun, but yeah, it’s hard to share,

Chris Bruno:
04:55
I think, to be fair, that’s probably giving me a really good Segway into toe sort of opening up this conversation. But what you just said, they’re for me. Everything about marketing is about experimentation, right way are constantly innovating, trying and like you said as well, you have some amazing winds. And those were the storeys that we probably brag about the most on then. You know, deep down inside, we know there’s been some epic failures, but again, it’s all about the learnings. So for everyone listening and especially for small to mid size businesses, how important the experimentation processes And why is it so important from from your point of view, in terms of understanding the data and understanding what works and what doesn’t? Would you mind talking a little bit about that? Yeah,

John Wall:
05:36
sure. I mean, especially for small to medium size business. You know, a lot of times we use analogies like you’re you know, you’re building a plane as you’re falling off a cliff or, you know, you’re trying Teo, change the wheels on the bus as you’re driving. You know, in smaller organisations you only have so many funds to work with. And so your ability to find the marketing and sales things that work as fast as possible can make the difference between you know, survival and failure. I mean, little make all the difference, and so then layered. On top of that, though, you’ve got human behaviour where people are irrational, you know you can’t just find one way to market or advertise. And how’d that work for the next 10 years? I mean, you’re constantly having to change and refine and move to where people are and speak to them in terms that they want to hear about and just constantly moving adjust. So, yeah, it’s a never ending process. You know, there’s just so much that you can do in so many different places to go. But you need to have a plan for okay, we can do these. You know, there’s 20 different options we could do to try and get new business in the door. Let’s pick three of these and test them out and see if any of these actually work. And then a justice we dio and you know, hopefully again. You managed to crack the code before the the pile of cash is gone.

Chris Bruno:
06:52
It is really important because from my side of it, I banging this drum a lot, and I’m always really excited and happy when guests. Actually, I’m not speaking about the same thing on it is very much that, you know, identifying your strategy, what it is Theo trying achieve, and then saying, right, I’m going to try these three things, for example, and it’s something that a lot of people don’t necessarily do. So they’ll either fixate on one thing or because they read an article about Seo are about PPC or about social media. You know, they just run down that deep, dark rabbit hole as fast as they can, trying to figure it out on DH Not necessarily remembering that the golden rule for me on digital Martinez we keep trying like we don’t know what’s gonna work and with the best will in the world. Andi, I think I have a follow up question for you after this one. But with the best will in the world, we don’t always get it right. First time on DH. Sometimes we shot back to buy the results that we get on. This is something I would love to know from your side. Have you experienced this before? Where you know that the thing that you thought was gonna work well, maybe hasn’t performed as well and something that you thought offers a bit of an outlier has ended up doing far better.

John Wall:
07:58
Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, that happens all the time and there’s a there’s a couple different, really critical points for that one is a lot of times people make the mistake of just doing one or two things like good example is videos. You know, people will be like, OK, let’s make some videos. Well, they’ll make one or two or three videos, and what I found over the long run is you go and you make 12 videos and you know, instead of making 1 40 minute video, make 12 1 minute videos. And the insane thing is, you may have those sitting out there, and just suddenly, a year and 1/2 later, one of them will go crazy and start to get all kinds of action. So it’s, you know, you can put all this stuff out there, but you kind of never know. What’s that magic intersection of, you know, the zeitgeist, whatever is hot right now. And, you know, when does it finally hit that one person who can share to 10 people who you know because where it finally caught you know it can take months and months for that happen. The other thing with that is that there’s I’ve done a lot of stuff talking to the authors of Traction just as Justin mayors and gave your Weinberg. And they’ve done actual research into startups and smaller companies and found that when you do this thing of picking three channels and you pick one, that’s the winner. Once you find one that does work, you do have to continue to drill way down in because there’s economies of scale on a learning curve in. So let’s just say you’re you know, you find that Facebook ads kind of work for you. After six months of doing Facebook ads, you’re gonna know so much more that you’re going to even increase your R Y further. You’re going to do better than anybody else who’s just been doing it for a week or two, and you can continue to mine and get better results by really specialising in the stuff

Chris Bruno:
09:37
that works. I think it’s really important that as well, because everything that we do in in Digital on, actually one of the things that really pulled me in the beginning of my career in marketing was all about that. It was the data side of it. I found it amazing that I could spend hours looking through to understand where people came from, how they were accessing what it was that they were looking at. What what pages? And you know that information today is almost endless on This is what you guys do for a living. But literally you, Khun, dig so deep Nowadays there is no real reason to be able to say or to justify not knowing what is and what isn’t working, right?

John Wall:
10:17
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s interesting. It’s a double edged sword in that a lot of folks because I’m in the same boat. I mean, I came from a direct marketing background, you know, back in the days of catalogues and that kind of stuff. And you can make the mistake of on ly looking at it from a direct marketing point of view is like, Okay, so we did this email. We got no action in these two days, so it’s obviously a failure. You know, you do have to look at the also over the long term because you may find campaigns where, you know, it didn’t deliver any results in the first week. But now, as we look back over the past 18 months, we find that 20% of the business came from that because it did manage tto generate awareness. You know, it didn’t actually generate action s Oh, it’s, you know, you do have to kind of take a long term look so you don’t miss, You know, you don’t get caught in a race to the bottom for clicks. I think is really the big part of that. You want to be looking across the board and over time as to what really works, but yet is just amazing how much more data there is. And like a great example, that is a lot of the stuff that goes on with Web analytics products like Lucky Orange, where you can actually watch somebody come into your website and see where they’re going. And, you know, follow the user’s pass through and you could just learn so much. I mean, in the past, that was limits, Tio, you know, cos that could afford to set up a focus group with 10 people the bang around the website and spend days doing this and now to just be able to go in and be like Oh, yeah, Look, everybody comes in and they’re looking for the pricing button and they don’t realise it’s over here, You know, if we put it over here, we can double our conversions. It’s just amazing to have that kind of stuff where you can make a huge difference with without too much effort.

Chris Bruno:
11:53
It is like I agree completely and the depth. So obviously, if you’re a little bit of a geek on, did you enjoy the data side of it? And you can really go down some rabbit holes right way. We’ve all been there because we enjoy it, but you start to really drill deeper. And you like that. No, I need to know, like over the last three months, what is the difference made when I change things, or one of the differences on the split testing that we did? And then how will I kind of actually impacted what people were doing, what they were on the site? And then you go into all sorts of other, whether it be Hajar or kiss metrics or whatever else and that heat maps on websites. So there’s a tonne of information and data. But I think what’s really something that’s marked me? And I wondered how you found this. But when we are talking to small to mid size businesses and even businesses that have got decent budgets, I always find it shocking the number of people that don’t necessarily have clearly defined objectives or goals that they’re trying to achieve before they set out to try different marketing channels or different marketing mediums. Is that something that you’ve come across?

John Wall:
12:56
Yeah, and as a matter of you know, unfortunately, we’ve had it backed up with data to I think there’s the CMO survey that comes out twice yearly. I think we were just appalled that, you know, I think that’s the last run. It was something like 34% of CMOS air making decisions based on no data whatsoever. And then, you know, and then even for the others, two out of three, it’s a sliding scale of how much data did they have? And are they, you know, are they just kind of using it to figure out whether to throw Iraq, you know, in front of him are behind him, or can they actually dial it all the way down into what channel? On what people to hit. So, yeah, it’s when there’s a lot of structural problems with that. You know, I think the biggest one is just turn and level of expertise, you know, it’s so money cos you know a marketing person comes in and they’ll set a bunch of things up. And if they do a lot of interesting stuff and great things, you know, four months later they’re getting their salary doubled by Joe opening to some other company. And then the next person comes in and sets up the same stuff. And it’s not uncommon for us to go into companies and find, you know, two or three instances of ghoul tag manager set up. You know, none of them working right, And you know, even a couple of sass products that they don’t realise that they’re paying monthly for nobody’s using. So, um, yeah, pretty much anybody in the marketing space that is just kind of doling out dollars on a whim has got a lot of work to do. But if you know the good news is, it’s not difficult ahs you talked about with. You know, Peredo does apply. Like you could do some basic, simple things to get your analytics in order that can at least give you some actionable results. You know, in a short border.

Chris Bruno:
14:37
So on a very basic scale, when again, I’m going. I’m talking mainly for our audience in terms of small businesses and stuff like that. But the very, very basic, You know, if you’ve got a website Google Analytics, right? For for us at least. Anyway, we’re we’re talking to clients at a very, very minimum level. Google Analytics starts to give you some insight as to what’s happening on your website. Social media. You know, you’ve got Facebook inside Twitter analytics. You get some basic information and actually, you know, even Facebook and Twitter you, Khun, dig deeper into. But these are like fundamental steps, right? Nobody should be having a website up for their business and not at least taking some time once a month, once every six weeks. To look at this information to really understand what’s going on.

John Wall:
15:20
Oh, absolutely, Yeah, that’s always where we start. You know, that’s the first thing that you want toe jump in and get going and you know, I mean, we would love to see that you kind of get everything up and running and you’ve got tag manager running. So it’s running across all your different properties and that you’ve got, you know, your goals built, you know, you’re taking full advantage is of goals across every channel. But it doesn’t have to even be that comprehensive look. I mean, even just having J set up across your main site so you can see the traffic, and then the big one is just using learning UT m codes so that you can create trackable links in all of your programme. So it’s like when you have a webinar, you don’t just link back to the website. You link back to a you know, a girl that’s showing you that this came from a webinar. So then at the end of the quarter, you can go in and look and say, OK, look, you know, we got 10% more traffic from because we did this webinar. You know, you can start to have an ideas for us, what’s bringing people in the front door and what’s working and that’s where you know anybody can at least you know, jump in and get started with that to get a better idea of where the business is coming from.

Chris Bruno:
16:24
What would you say are the biggest KP eyes that small businesses should be focused on? And I know obviously this is going to be relating to strategy relating to their goals and their objectives as well, to a certain extent. But from your point of view, one of the basics that you know most small business should be being paying attention to. Yeah,

John Wall:
16:44
that’s a great question because, you know, it’s I mean, in a perfect world, you would just have your customer acquisition cost in their lifetime value and, you know, that would be it. You’d be golden, right? I mean, you know what it takes to get somebody in the door and how much they’re gonna be worth. And then you know how much you know you can afford to spend to get them to become a customer. And and it’s that easy. And of course, you know, as you’re well aware, the you know, the reality is far messier and stick year in a disaster. But you can I think one thing that you know is not always statistically relevant even, But it’s at least a place to start is, you know, start with a simple conversion thing, like it doesn’t have to be. How many deals have you closed for? You know, over the last 18 months for this software product that takes, you know, six or seven months to determine. It’s just like, what does it take to get somebody to the pricing page or to request a demo? And you see, you’ve got a small place to start, as far as like, Okay, well, would you know? What can we try here to maybe try and double the amount of demos were getting every month and it’s time goes on. You know you’ll be able to see better, like, Okay, you know, the demos we get from this point or better than the ones we get from here. And, you know, we know that demo should be recorded, you know, converting at this percentage rate of that rate. But, you know, just trying to get a close is you can to dial into What does it take to get somebody to show up and become a prospect. And then how much more does it take to get a sale? And then what are they worth after the stallion? The worth after the sale is the one that gets a lot of it gets overlooked most frequently, you know, especially in the SAS world, that can just kill you If you’re not paying attention to what the churns like, you know, you could be thinking that you’re doing a killer job, getting all these new people in the front door and not paying attention to the fact that, like 80% of them, are gone before 12 months. That’s that’s the kind of thing that wipes out of sass company.

Chris Bruno:
18:29
It is always interesting to me, and especially for small, more smaller businesses and not so much tech start ups because they more savvy but smaller businesses that are trying to do stuff online. Whether be commerce or sales, the lack of understanding or knowledge in terms ofthe what is your SEPA on average? And what is your lifetime value of a customer to people repeat eyes that one off purchases are high values, a low value, and we were doing a strategy session with somebody recently in regards to what they’re trying to do and what they’re trying to launch. And again, we were asking this. Well, what do you think the lifetime value would be? And they were like that? Well, to be honest with you right now, I haven’t fought past. This is the initial product. Okay, cool. Well, let’s start to look at that as well, because, obviously, you know, if you’re thinking this is a turns into a monthly subscription product, if this turns into a yearly subscription product you know, even if this is something that you know you should regularly do, you’re recommending that you do this once a year, once every six months. Whatever it might be, then you have this repeat business in this repeat possibility of actually having an increased lifetime value, as opposed to knowing exactly where you’re at. But the second question that really sort of hit with them. And I remember them. Actually, you’re replying to me afterwards, but I said, What? Your margins on the product on DH literally like that? You’re the only agency that’s asked us this so far. And I said, That’s really that’s really interesting, because from my point of view, How could we get How could we even start to guess how much we can spend her acquisition, for example, on what sort of numbers were you targeting without knowing what you’re going to actually make off the sale? So I found myself almost doing I don’t say economics one on one or business 101 But it was kind of like, you know, I’m sorry that these other agencies didn’t bring this up, but from my side, you know, unless we know what you’re playing with and what kind of numbers are gonna be acceptable, I find it really hard and uncomfortable to go forward and say Right, let’s spend £10,000 find out that it cost you five x What you’re going to make to make every sale.

John Wall:
20:24
Yeah, absolutely. Isn’t it amazing how that doesn’t get factored? And I think I don’t know. It’s going to be very interesting because we’re kind of at this point where things air really wonky in the economy and for so for the past, I don’t know, 10 years. There’s kind of been the SAS idea of like, Well, it doesn’t really matter how much money. We lose per customer because if we just get to a point where we have enough, customers will be able to go public and everything will take care of itself. And I mean, that definitely doesn’t work for any company that’s not considering to go public, you know? I mean, if you’re if, ah, I’ve just been laughing about Scott Galloway had a funny storey about one of these companies, companies that was doing direct to consumer mattresses, and he was looking at their strategy said, Look, thes people would’ve been smarter if they just put $300 on the mattress and gave him way to people for free like that. That would be a better economic model than their current business model. And so, yeah, good on you for, you know, getting the client to kind of play a little bit more attention to, you know, how much were they gonna be able to make over the long run? Because you have that totally influence is kind of the degree of spin. Are you gonna have to spend $500 a week to get him in the door? And so you need to be making personal calls or can you, you know, spend you know, five bucks a click and do this all automated. I mean, it totally changes your approach to how you’re gonna do it.

Chris Bruno:
21:46
Yeah, What is interesting? Because I weigh had this conversation with Matt Ramsey. I think his name is on a recent episode on Basically, we’re talking about the kind of commoditisation off they do a lot of websites stuff for manufacturing and for industry based businesses. But this commoditisation of marketing as a service and it’s become I don’t say scary, but I’ve had conversations with companies where they say to me, No, no, we pay someone for £100 a month to do our social media. What you guys are talking about is crazy money on. We’ve gone. Fair enough. You know we’re not right for everybody. We understand that. Just out of interest, how the results. Looking from your £400 a month you’re currently spending. And invariably, you know, at that point they go well, either one. What results? What are you talking about? Social media is just something we have to do, At which point you think Wow a ll The 2nd 1 is. Well, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t bother us. But you realise at that point it has zero value to them because it doesn’t actually bring anything in. They’re basically paying somebody to write tweets and schedule them for them with no goal in mind, with no actual actionable results from it. Andan over complication of, you know, vanity metrics, which really don’t matter to a business because, like you said, the only thing we’re really interested in, how much did we spend? What’s the cost per acquisition on? What’s the lifetime value? Is this making us money?

John Wall:
23:11
Yeah, absolutely. Isn’t that? And you hit it on the head with vanity metrics? You know, those organisations were at some point on the line, you know, when they started doing it was just like, Okay, how many likes did we get this week? You know, it’s that kind of mentality that then just becomes this race to the bottom, where yeah, they’ve got some skin, she company posting a bunch of links that there posting the same likes for their other 50 clients. And it’s, you know, just a huge waste of time for everybody.

Chris Bruno:
23:34
It is a shame, but right, Let’s get back into the geeky stuff that I enjoy as well. So in terms ofthe from you guys is pointedly trust insight. I’d love to know any kind of examples that you’ve had of this as well, in terms of small to mid size businesses. But how convey to be used to really help himto identify what’s working, what’s not. But more importantly, where to put their money, especially in those early days when, like you mentioned earlier, you know, people are tight. We don’t have a lot of money when it comes to small businesses were trying to find the best use of that cash. What are some of the things, the key things that people can do to really kind of make maximise that impact in those early stages? Yeah, for us,

John Wall:
24:14
there’s been three areas that we focus on with our clients that have worked for us. You know, the most exciting and interesting one is predictive marketing where we’re taking and looking at, you know, looking at your industry, looking at the topics you cover and giving you a calendar of when things are actually going to peak. So a good example of that Ondas funny with so many of our clients, of course, don’t want to share any of their data. We’ve come up with a generic data set and we call it the cheese Report that we release twice a year. And you can actually see you know which weeks of the year will certain Jesus be, You know, at their height and at their peak. So, for example, this was all new to me. I had never heard of halloumi, which is a cheese that peaks in the summers in July and August. Because it’s a gorilla bowl chief. Delicious on the barbecue

Chris Bruno:
24:56
John, How do you not know this yet? You’ve got to try that.

John Wall:
25:00
That’s Oh, yeah, I’m surprised that you know the storey. So you’re ahead of the curve on that. And yes. Oh, don’t like that was all news to me. And, of course, if you are some kind of food related industry, are you running a cheese shop? You would know that, OK, in April in May, we need to be doing the videos on how to grill the cheese and, you know, do a couple block posts on what cheeses they’re gonna buy this week. Hey, be sure to get your order in early for home with me. Because when the season and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, predictive is it is a big part for us because it solves just what we were talking about earlier in that instead of just sitting there and thinking like Okay, what five topics should I write about this week? You actually have a graph of like? Okay, well, here’s the topics that are going to be hot over the next four months or four weeks. And so build your content plan around that, you know, work around these things and you’ll be able to, you know, just generate more organic traffic. So predictive is is a big piece of ah, the puzzle. The second level for us is just data mining and data analysis. You know, being able to look at both your customer data that you have and data from 1/3 party services outside of your organisation to find commonalities in, you know, your prospects, their customers. Eso a good example of that is we found for a client that was doing a lot of church related things, that actually there is a huge preponderance of pet owners and in fact, dog owner specifically. So we found out that, Hey, if you take all of your ad campaigns where you’re just spending, you know, straight out the door with little segmentation, if you take in target dog owners make that part of your part of the distribution of the ads, you actually will increase your results by 10 to 20%. Because we just know that there’s a better chance that they’re qualified because they have this characteristic S O data makes the 2nd 1 And then what we run into with every client is they want to do some of this cool stuff. And as we dig in, we find out, you know, just a CZ you were talking about. Well, they don’t even know what the lifetime value is or what the margin is. So there’s a lot of work to be done, and, you know, maybe getting the female vendor data over across to see around so you can better track results and get a better view of attribution and what’s working? There’s always infrastructure, that stuff that needs to get done, and it just makes no sense to do a lot of those projects in house. You know, if you were to put a nightie person, okay, they’re going to spend two months, you know, building some kind of integration or getting some integration work. And they’re never gonna do that again. Where, as you know, we can come in and we’ve done this 10 times before. We already know where the all the gotchas are and where the common problems are, and we can just get it done so you can spend your time, you know, creating content and doing stuff that on Lee your team could. D’oh! And that’s really where you know, we can help provide some benefit.

Chris Bruno:
27:45
There’s a couple of things that I’m going to talk about because this is something but one I’m always shocked about when I hear people that are doing social content creation, stuff like that is you mentioned exactly the content calendar. Now this to me seems so obvious in the sense off, you should be planning around some sort of ah, strategy, a plan. But even more basic than that is how many businesses seem to get caught out on even by big holidays on things like that. big events in their industry. But they caught out and you can see them almost scrambling to try and create content for that particular purpose. Andi, I mean, this is This sounds awful, but I have spoken to companies in the first and second week of December who have spoken to me saying they need their content for Christmas Christmas elf on literally. You have to have that conversation going. I’d love to, but you should have called me like eight weeks ago. Like all of our clients, stuff has been done for for weeks now, like we know doing Christmas content at this point, we’re now planning towards, you know, well, after the New Year, what comes next? Valentine’s Day, even just the big holidays on the industry specific ones afterwards, that then catch people out, We think. Wow, come on, guys like this wasn’t snuck up on you. You know, it’s not some kind of, ah random news flash that suddenly came up that you had to respond to there. And then These are things that are happening every year, year in, year out. And it’s quite it’s quite shocking to me. Still, actually, and we do have a free content calendar, which actually, we’ve been meaning to update for 2020. But other things are happening this year, but people are still downloading the 2019 1 because invariably it’s still has the key dates and things. But we’re amazed at how many people are doing this without. And the second thing I was going to ask you about as well, which and you mention this earlier. You know, people want to do the cool stuff, right? It’s exciting. It sounds like fun. Let’s do this, really, and I really funky, overly complicated funnel that’s potentially gonna go absolutely nowhere. But it sounds interesting, and I read an article about it once. Therefore, let’s do that. But we also find on the social side, when we first started talking to a client, they’ll be like that. Yep. So what we need is on. Then they’ll rattle off every single platform that they’ve ever heard off already, including tic tac and whatever else. Because people have said to me that the attention right now on Tic Tac is priceless is well worth it. One thing other. So we listen and we take notes and we talk, and then we say? Right call. What are you gonna put up on this stuff? What I wanted, what was the plan here? Because you’re talking about YouTube videos. You’re gonna start creating how many videos you’re gonna create every week, every month. Like, what’s the plan here and block blogging. You want to be on medium as well? I think that’s a great idea. Also, who’s gonna be writing all this content on Facebook and Twitter? And what about engagement on what about getting involved in conversations? And you start having this convo with them on invariably 90% of organisation. I realised at that point that they’re biting off more than they can chew on. I think this is something that’s huge, and I’d love to have your sort of side of it, especially again remembering our audience small to mid size businesses Focus for me. Focusing on a couple of channels on trying to do those as best as you can is worth 100 X trying to be on all channels and realising that you’re basically failing across the full rib.

John Wall:
31:02
Yeah, exactly. Selling it. All of them know it’s Yeah, it is totally overwhelming. And I mean you have to feel for the smaller bit medium business owner because it’s obviously totally overwhelming, you know? I mean, most of the small, the medium business people, the executives are the folks that have started this company. So they’re you know, they’re either great software developers or they’re great at running a restaurant or, you know, just the doing S CEO is absolutely nothing that they know anything about or have any interest in doing. And so it’s Yeah, it’s completely overwhelming. And so, like you said, they do kind of first resort like, Okay, give me a little dash of everything, you know, not realising that, you know, that’s the fast path. The mediocrity and failure is you. If you’ve got $10,000 sprinkling $100 all over the place is just not going to do anything for you at all. Um, a lot of the things that we prescribed for those kinds of situations is, you know, starting with the PLA. Guess it’s an old, tired message, but it’s still makes the most sense in the world, and I think, actually, probably is due for an update in that we don’t even have to call it block anymore because that makes it sound old and tired. I think it’s start with your website, you know, having great content on your website, which oh, by the way, is probably gonna look a whole lot like a blogged. But we just don’t have to call it a blogged. And there’s a couple of huge things for that. I mean, one is just the FC L value right is huge. There’s no better are why than getting your website right so that you can get free organic Google traffic like that’s going to be the best you can do as far as getting people in the front door. And then at least the benefit of that is. If you do get good at posting stuff on the Web site, well, then that will start to translate easily across the other things. You know, you can say, OK, so here’s the 10 best block post. Let’s make a video out of those, even if it’s just somebody you know, kind of mostly reading the block post and adding something to make the video a little bit more interesting. And you can bundle three of the best block posts up and make that a subject of a webinar and you you can start to. And that’s where I think again, a an agency or a marketing professional that has kind of been around the block a few times gets is the fact that you can repurpose all the content you don’t have toe be doing block posts and making some videos that are totally unrelated to that and doing a webinar that has nothing to do with it, either. It’s, you know, you start with a blood coast on it to generate the webinar, which then gives you the video and that’s you. You’re only doing kind of the grinding of the thing out. You’re not re creating content every step of the way, you know, fresh stuff. And again, that totally meshes in with the CEO efforts to of what we usually see. If if you take one piece of content and you put it up in your website and then keep going back to it every quarter, updating and keeping it current, those were the kinds of pages that would suddenly when you look two or three years down the line, you know you’re getting 10 to 20% of your website to these couple pages. Just because they’re the

Chris Bruno:
33:50
two resource is is really interested. You said as well, because it’s It’s this effort that goes in to get you somewhere and it’s not today. It might not be tomorrow. In fact, realistically, it’s definitely not gonna be tomorrow. But when it comes to stuff like the CEO or whether it be sort of Mohr generic brand awareness, you know, you were talking about those direct marketing campaigns that don’t necessarily have that impact there and then but actually invariably further down the route, you see that those things are what helped you pick up people. But the sio on this reminds me again. We’re talking about PPC thie other day on DH. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name of the guests, and I apologise in advance for that. But we were talking about that on DH when we were talking about it, the thing that really came from it, Everything people want basically of really fast results on we go back to this commoditisation of the marketing services that people offer, and they’re like that. Well, you know, there’s this company that’s advertising one funnel that will change my business and make me thousands of dollars while whilst I sleep. And invariably I’m sat there going cool like I really hope it works genuinely. I do because I want you to find success, Andi. I’d be I’d be more than happy for you to ring me up and tell me that you bought this one funnel and it all works magically. I said that I don’t believe in it personally, but again, good luck, and we’ll see how it works. And I think that’s one of the big things where people don’t necessarily realise doing stuff today is gonna have ripple effects and ripple effects. Not just for today, Not just for tomorrow, but potentially years down the line. You know, content. Today we get to host and this is the beautiful thing about nowadays as well. When I first started the agency social ink, it was in 2008. So when we had clients that didn’t do video stuff, we were getting stuff like Premium Vimeo account to be able to host it or wished here to try and hostal this kind of content, then be able to share it on their website and things like that. So you started to build up costs, Not to mention we own camera equipment that costs a small fortune. Today you can literally go live on an iPhone on Facebook, and that’s it. That video is hosted for you, free of charge forever and ever and ever, which is an absolutely beautiful thing. But people don’t necessarily realise the long term benefits. And how. How is this something that you help people to understand? You know, what you do today could have impacts six months a year, two years down the line, as opposed to, you know, the people that are chasing those quick winds.

John Wall:
36:22
Yeah, that’s that’s a huge challenge. And ultimately that comes to your alignment with the top management or whoever is, you know, kind of rut making all the marketing decisions because, yeah, they tend to fall into two camps. There’s the people who think, Oh, well, we can just throw some money at this. Yeah, I may have had a CEO once say to me, You know, what I really want to do is spend $1 get to and I mean, I had to say, Well, yes. So what everyone else on earth like that to be, You know, any place where you could show up and give him $5 get 10 like, Yeah, that’s unfortunately things usually don’t work that way. It’s just the reality. And yeah, we’ve seen it with, you know, we’ve been doing the podcast for 12 years and more than half the business that we get from trust insights are people who know us from the podcast. You know, they trust us because they heard us before. But you know, that’s not You can’t replicate lead that, you know, nobody’s gonna be able to just start up a podcast for you and be able to double the amount of leads you’re going to get over the next month. So yeah, Unfortunately, it’s just Ah, you know, you kind of need to find people that understand, and we’re seeing a similar thing now, like during an economic downturn, right? There’s kinds of organisations you’re going to find, the ones that are just goingto slash and burn and hope that they survive. And then there’s gonna be organisations that you know are going to use this as an opportunity to get the best deals that they can get, you know, they’re still gonna keep their media presence, But they’re gonna work with their sales rap. Then they’ll probably paying a whole lot less, because the sales rep is going to take anything because things are so bad. And then they’re gonna be investing in there. People, you know, you’ve got downtime. So now we can do that training that we’ve been putting off for years, and and you can hire away talent, too. You know, there’s gonna be talent that gets laid off because the companies that you know didn’t put aside a war chest aren’t gonna be able to hang on to him. And so, yeah, it’s kind of, Ah, it’s a long term, short term frame of mind And, yeah, unfortunately, could be a real challenge. It’s kind of a rule that dice, you know, Unfortunately, there’s no way you can’t second that your AdWords on long term thinkers. For the short term thinkers, it’s just a matter of going on enough dates and finding the right the right people to get married to, you know, But again, over the long run, that’s the great thing. And I’m sure you’ve already seen this, too, because you’ve been in business long enough. You find those magical clients that you can actually talk honestly with, and they, you know, are rational with their decision making. And they’re good clients tohave because they’re looking at the long term, and they know it’s gonna pay off

Chris Bruno:
38:47
Eventually, I talked about this quite often, but I started calling. I started sort of segmenting my clients, and I started it and labelling bad profits on certain clients because they might pay well. They might pay on time everything else. But they were just hard work because they didn’t want to listen because they wouldn’t buy into what we were trying to help them with. They fight us on certain things. You have to fight back to try and help explain. And invariably we’d make money, which is fine on when you’re starting out in business. You think that’s the key Metric, right? You need revenue because you’re new, you don’t have any, And if you don’t get some, then you know you’re not gonna be a business very long. And it was probably about 45 years ago and I was like that. I’m out. I don’t want any more bad profits. I’d rather go bust because I don’t have anyone to work with than working with people that just constantly made your life a misery. But not only that, they fight you on things that basically end up heh, letting their business as much, if not more than it hurts my business. And it was something that was really kind of like a click moment for me in terms of when you find those legendary clients as magical clients. And we brought it to a certain businesses since 12 4011 on. We’re still working with them today, but when they ask us about something, they don’t fight us. When we come back with a solution or a proposed plan, they know with confidence that they can trust us in the sense off. Yeah, okay, if you say this is the way to do it and that’s the price, then you know we’re not looking for a new partner. We’re not going to try and save 5% or 10% somewhere else. We just want to get this done in the way that we were hoping to do, and if you come up with a solution for that. Then let’s make this happen. And I think that’s the golden thing right when you’re starting out in the business to try and identify what those things are. And I’m not sure how you guys have found this with trust. But, you know, I talked about the 80 20 were all the other day on the podcast something that’s so basic, you know, 80% of your revenue comes probably from 20% your client. But at the same time, 80% of your problems and your issues and the stress probably also comes from a different 20% of those clients as well.

John Wall:
40:57
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And s. So in the type of work that we do, you even feel that in your gut. You know, if you’re just smart enoughto once a year, sit down and go down your list, you’re gonna be like, Oh, wait a minute. You know, we’re making this from these people and you know, I’m feeling pain from this every week, like it’s totally obvious for that. We do see similar stuff with larger midsized companies that have support organisations. You know, every once in a while you run these reports and you see that, you know, and this is like classic dark data for us. We go in and we can say to somebody, Look at this. Did you know that? You know, 5% of your customers are making up 90% of the support calls that go over an hour, you know, and suddenly you find out that, like, bye, you know, jettison ng 5% of your customer base. You can increase your total possibility by 10 20% you some insane numbers. And it even comes to the point where you know, there’s some customers where you’re willing to send them a gift certificates of the competition to make him go away because you know that you’re, you know, delivering Ah, fun package to your competitors.

Chris Bruno:
42:01
Yes, I haven’t heard that before, but that’s blinding. I love that as an idea.

John Wall:
42:06
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that there’s there are and you know and we all know these people, it’s, I don’t know. It’s just it’s a very bizarre, organisational behaviour thing of like once an organisation gets to a certain size like there’s people in the yard that are just doing things to justify their being there. So they’ll stay on the phone forever and do all kinds of crazy things that have no in business impact but end up being an expense for you. And so, yeah, being ableto yeah, we’ve seen tonnes of crazy storeys like that of, you know, people dropping 1/3 of their customers and increasing their profitability 80%. You know, things like that where you just kind of take some time to do some wine, and that goes back to what you’re talking about. Profitability in lifetime value. You know, every once in a while you find that there’s the’s customers that like, yeah, they’re paying their bills every week and maybe they’re not at the top of the payment plan. But then suddenly, as you you dig and you look, you look well. They actually never upgrade on anything. And, oh, by the way, they are. You know, we’re having to baby sit them every month with all this custom work. And you just realised that Yeah, you’re everybody’s better office, they gets thrown overboard.

Chris Bruno:
43:08
It’s that moment when you realise you’ll go bust because you’re working very, very hard for the wrong people. and it’s a tough It’s a tough lesson to learn.

John Wall:
43:17
Oh, yeah? Well, especially like in down cycles where, you know, you kind of get this mentality of OK, we’ll just take any business that comes to the door and that can actually kill you. You know, if you I end up getting four or five clients that air just a tonne of pain and that stops you from being able to do prospecting and trying to upgrade them all the time. Yeah, you can. You can basically be kind of lighting your rescue boat on fire.

Chris Bruno:
43:40
Okay, John, before we wrap up, what’s the biggest tip or piece of advice that you’d give to any small to mid size businesses listening right now,

John Wall:
43:50
try and get to a point where you know people are coming from. And I guess the easy one would that is, make sure baked into your process somewhere at some point, you’re asking people. Hey, how did you hear about us? You know, where did you come from? Like that just needs to be ingrained in your culture that you’re going to try and capture that data. And even if it’s on a chalkboard in the back. You know, when the waiters are out there, if they can ask that five times a night and you can have a scorecard in the back to give you some kind of data to give you a better idea of where business is coming from, that will pay off huge in the long run.

Chris Bruno:
44:18
I love it, John, Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today on DH. I’m looking forward to our probably ending up catching up with you again some other time to talking more in depth about some at some analytics and some more geeky stuff.

John Wall:
44:31
Oh, that sounds great. Yes, I’m always up for talking a marketing geek stuff and the latest tech. So it’s a pleasure.

Chris Bruno:
44:37
Thank you

Chris Bruno  44:41  

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