Focus your time without spending a dime. A beginner’s guide to thinking about your product mix and how you’re going to market it online. Some pointers include: creating lots of content, doing some small things to improve your search engine optimization, specialize within your product mix, post consistently on a network or a few, join discussion groups, make product videos, and make a company intro video.
TRANSCRIPTION
Title: FireHour: How to Drive, Print and Promo Buyers to Your Digital Door
Date: 11/18/2021
Duration: 46:41
James: Hi guys, thanks for joining us today. As promised, we’re going to talk about how to Drive, Print and Promo Buyers to your Digital Door, go over some free marketing tips, and hopefully you guys learn something from our presentation. So thanks for joining us.
Gene: Yeah, so pretty excited to talk to you about this today. Think of today as an intro, play this in the background, that’s okay, while you’re working in your shop or whatever. Think of it as an intro to some free marketing tips and some free things that you need to be doing to get started in this space if you haven’t already. Our scope is not going to go deep into SEO or deep into search engine marketing or anything like that. First of all, I wouldn’t say that either of us are experts on that. And because of that, if you already have a website and it’s got a ton of traction, it might be a few pointers that you might pick up from James and I, but this video probably isn’t for you. So think of this as a beginner’s guide to thinking about your product mix and how you’re going to market that online.
Building update, it is kind of a drawn-out battle, we’ve had some environmental concerns with the property and where it sits. And so we’ve had to go into additional testing, they got to dig like a 60 foot well on the property. If any of you guys are interested in learning more about that, about phase one, phase two environmental, or anything about the building. Or if you were buying a building for your print shop or sign shop, and you’re running into some of these issues, feel free to reach out to us. You can send me an email, [email protected], and then of course, this is [email protected]. So feel free to send us an email about that. But with that being said, let’s get into our presentation. We’ll try and keep this one just a little bit shorter because I know last week ran long.
Okay, so focus your time without spending a dime, marketing, that’s really what it is, it’s kind of figuring out what to focus on. Trying a bunch of different things and then seeing what works and zoning in on that.
[4:53] Content is King
James: Our first slide here is content is king, creating tons of great content is your top priority. So for us, kind of like this video, creating content, getting stuff out there, getting sell sheets made, getting videos up, quick product videos and stuff like that. Everything you can do to give your customers more of something so that they can hand it off and use it to their salespeople or just whatever. And we just recently hired a salesperson and the most valuable tool that we can give that salesperson is content to give to our distributors, and it keeps us valuable. It builds a moat around our business a little bit, the more content that we can create. All of our marketing efforts are definitely supported by content, everything kind of works altogether, I’d say. You have to have sell sheets in order to have distributors take your products to end-users.
Gene: It is, everything is supported by content. You can’t build ads without content, you can’t drive traffic without content, you can’t attract people to your site without content. SEO (search engine optimization) is very content-driven, so getting ranked on Google is all rated by content. Some ideas for content I think would be useful here is like, let’s say you’re a sign shop, what are some of the simplest forms of content that a sign shop can put out there? Like maybe images and pictures of things that you’ve done, installs that you’ve done, maybe sample signs. Even if you’re in a real small town, you know, basic signs, printable signs, things like that for garage sales and whatnot. It’s kind of a stretch because if you’re in a larger area and you do something like that, it’s probably never going to get seen. But if you are in a pretty specific geography, that kind of content could be useful, but I would definitely start with lots and lots of images and videos of you guys doing installs.
James: Yeah, and when you’re posting that stuff to Facebook or Instagram, or you’re putting it on your website or whatever, when you have other customers looking at that stuff. Like if you’re promoting stuff for political, and then you’re promoting stuff for lawn mowers, accounting firms or something like that. And if you’ve got other ones of their competitors coming to you, then that’s one of the things that we always try to target, is by broadening the industries that we’re reaching with our product images and stuff. And we put it on our site so that it just kind of helps to add a little bit of creativity to everything. It’s really important to try and create as much content as possible, and so we try hard to do it two to four times per day. Whether that’s social media posts or something, or just coming up with new product photos, stuff like that. So the more you do, obviously the better and it’s cheap and it’s fairly easy. Even taking pictures of products and stuff, we can’t, since we’re a trade printer, we have to be very cautious about that kind of stuff, taking pictures of products. So anything that you see on our social media page or anything like that is all generally created by us and then put out there.
Gene: Yeah, and Bridget has been doing an excellent job recently, but when we’re really good at it, you do see a spike in movement in traction on our website. And there were 2 trillion searches on Google and 300 billion that had never been searched before. Now that’s actually from search engine land 2017, so the numbers have grown since then, but think about that for a second. In 2017, there were 2 trillion searches on Google and 300 billion of them have never been searched before. So that means somebody is typing in some sort of question you know, specific or a detailed question, and that is the first time in like 20 years into Google’s existence, in 2017 was the first time somebody ever typed that in 300 billion times. So the only way to capture that kind of stuff is to have lots of long-tail content, which we’ll get into what that is here in a minute.
[9:00] SEO
James: So real quick, we’re not going to dive too deep into this. We could probably do like a whole show about SEO, and when we talk about SEO, we’re talking about like the easy, free stuff for SEO. SEO, so search engine optimization, this is how your site or your products basically rank off of keywords and stuff like that, and just basically your searchability.
Gene: You type a search into Google, what comes up on those Google search results. So there’s paid placement at the very top of the Google search results, there tends to be paid placement, maybe along the side.
James: Yeah, and Google and Yelp, and I mean all the search engines, they want to try to provide you with the best content possible. And so they’re not really going always off the paid placement, there’s a lot of room to grow there, like in the free organic stuff.
Gene: They have an incentive to actually provide you with an answer to your question. That’s the highest incentive they have because that keeps you coming back and then they can charge people for those eyeballs that keep coming back.
James: Yes, absolutely. So what we really try to focus on here is we start with our website and the real simple, easy stuff that we can do with our website… And if you guys are working on your website or something like this, or even if you’re just posting products as social media, make sure that the names of your products are relevant. And so you can go to Google AdWords and you can actually create an account with Google AdWords for free. You have to start a campaign, but you can pause or cancel a campaign, but then you get what’s called keyword planner through Google AdWords, and we’ll talk about that more in the future. But what’s really cool about keyword planner is it actually lets you go in and search different keyword for the rankings with Google and you can see how many people are looking at that specific search volume. And that’s really nice because if you’ve got something that you’re really kind of questioning how to word it or what to call it, like whether you want to call it a bandit sign or a yard sign, a political sign, rally fan, an auction paddle, whatever, you can see what gets more volume. And then it’s always good to take whatever keywords you’re planning on using and actually do a physical keywords or a physical search in Google. You might put it like in incognito mode so that you can actually see what the natural organic stuff is, rather than based on what your recommendations are. And that will just kind of help give you a little bit of traction for what keywords you want to use.
And so when I say name the products on your site, if you go to firestone.com and you look at specifically yard signs, or auction paddles or rally fans or selfie frames or any one of those specific products, you want to make sure that those are pulling in the customers and getting them to actually click on what you want them to click on. The next thing is to make your page relevant by updating any bad links. If you have bad links on your website that are going to 404errors or anything like that, you want to just try to eliminate those, get those out of the way. You can either delete them or redirect them, whatever you prefer. Because if you have a ton of bad links on your site, then Google’s going to look at that naturally. And they’re going to say ah, this isn’t quite what we want to show their customer, their search, you know, the person searching. They want to get good content up there. So whoever answers that question first, whoever answers the fastest, without going too deep into stuff for having bad links or making it hard to understand or hard to read, Google’s gonna naturally just try to bump you up and make you rank a little bit higher.
Next thing is name your images. And so like for us, when we’re uploading images to our website, there’s an option to name those photos. That’s always good because if you name it political yard sign and somebody goes in and they search political yard sign, then there’s a really good chance that the more hits you get and the more you do that, the more content you have on your site. You’ll rank really high for that product photo.
Gene: And that’s one of the ways that the search engine understand what that image is for. And James is using kind of generic terms and we’re focused on political yard signs here for the whole nation, but for you, you might be focused on a small town or just a region or an area. And so to say something like vehicle wrap in Massachusetts, right, or vehicle, that’s pretty big actually, but vehicle wrap in Springfield Illinois and naming your image in that respect will help with the search rankings in that. Getting real specific with the actual title of the image.
James: Yes, and then the next thing too, they’re looking at bodies of text on your website or on your products. And so if you’ve got a chart or something that you want to show how something is made, it might not look as pretty to do this. But to go and actually build the chart on your site so that it’s all text versus just an image, that text is all searchable and it just kinda gives you a little bit of juice there. And so you’ll see that link on our site too, where we’ll build a chart so that way we get more keywords on there and a little bit of rank from it.
Gene: This one’s important, this last one that you’re about to say is important. It’s probably the most important thing to do if your target is a local audience.
James: Yeah, so make sure you’ve got your contact information on every page, make it easy for customers to find you. I mean, that’s business 101, make sure that it’s at the top or bottom or both, or wherever. And then every page you go to, make it easy for customers to get ahold of you. If you make it too difficult, then naturally, organically, you just lose them, and then naturally too Google doesn’t grab it as easily. So yeah, just make it simple, go through that process, and it’s cheap, it’s free and it’s an easy way to keep customers with you.
So say you’re going after pediatric, dentistry or something like that, and you’re trying to sell promo to that sector, anytime you are emailing somebody or you’re posting on Facebook, LinkedIn or anything, try to link back to your site whenever possible. If you can link as much as possible, it’s always good because it helps with everything. Whether you’re doing it on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or something, it drives business to your site through that as well as it helps give you that link juice just to kind of raise everything up. And make it so that we’re trying really hard to get that free organic search to show up more.
Gene: It just makes it easy for people to get back to you. If you’re talking about yourself in a post or something like that, a link back to your site makes it easy so they don’t have to take multiple steps to get back to you. So it makes sense both with SEO and with just the natural path that a customer would take.
James: Absolutely, so make sure you update Google my business. So if you Google, Google my business, you can build a profile, it’s really easy.
Gene: Type Google my business into Google and it’ll get you there.
James: Yeah, exactly. And same thing with Yelp and any search engines that you can, just make sure that your information is up to date. You know, work hours, your phone number, your email address, your location, make sure you got a good image up there. All that stuff is so easy to do, and doesn’t take you hardly any time after this, before you go home, you can do that. That’s your homework. But just make sure that you’ve got that stuff up to date, that just keeps everything relevant. And then also your LinkedIn page and your Facebook page, all that stuff, just make sure all that information is up to date. Not having something right when somebody is looking for you, it’s a quick way for somebody to move on and go look at your competitor or something. And so very simple, very easy process to do.
Gene: So you’ll notice that with SEO, if you stop and you think about it, if you go and Google or you get on YouTube and you’re looking for an SEO checklist or something to do when you’re going through your site on how to have great SEO, there are a lot of things that you do that are fairly specific to the search algorithm. So things that maybe don’t make a lot of sense to you, do make sense to the search algorithms. That kind of stuff is actually a minority. It gets talked about a lot because that is kind of the voodoo behind SEO, it’s why you pay people a lot of money to get moved from third to first, if you’re trying to rank for really competitive keywords. But most of SEO, I don’t know what the percentage is, 80 or 90% of SEO actually is trying to make your site and the content that you put out there very, very usable for a human, for a person to log in.
So if you think about it, Google, when they rank a website, and rank meaning they want them to be at the top of the list, they want a really great website with a solid answer to the question that they have. Or if it’s a product that you’re looking for, where’s the best place to buy this. And again, they have an incentive to provide that valuable information. And what that means is when you are thinking about what to do next with your SEO, stop thinking about what Google is trying to accomplish and start thinking about what your customers are trying to accomplish. Putting links that kind of take people back and forth through a story on your website are wonderful. They also help you with SEO and search engine rankings. Making sure that all of your addresses and phone numbers and store hours and everything else are up to date on Facebook and Google Yelp and everywhere else. Well, the search engines like that, but your customers will also very much like that.
Naming images, so if somebody right clicks on an image and saves it to their desktop because they think it’s really cool and they want to show it to their coworker or something, ‘Hey, we should have these guys wrap our car’. I want to show them some of these and I’m old school, so I saved them from my desktop. Well the name of that image then helps that customer remember where to get it from, right? If it’s named with your company name or something like that. So those kinds of things are very useful for people, and then they also happen to work really well to empower your SEO. So don’t get too caught up in it, make stuff really easy for a human to use, and the search engines will catch up to that.
James: And one of the thing too that we haven’t really touched on yet, we’re in the process of hiring a digital marketing agency to help us with some of our SEO and just digital marketing in general. And one of the big things I would say is when you hire an expert to come in, you want to try and clean up, get all the crap out of the way. Make it so that they can actually focus on what’s big and what you really want them to focus on. Things like directing hours and stuff, you don’t need to really pay somebody to that kind of stuff, as long as you got a little bit of knowledge as to how to edit your site, store hours, just things like that. Let the experts focus on the harder stuff, the deeper stuff, the bigger stuff.
Gene: This is when you guys grow to be far larger than we are I think. Hi everyone who has joined us live, thank you so much for being here.
James: Please feel free to ask any question that you want us to answer.
[20:35] Specialize
Gene: So specialized, getting back into product mix and whatnot. Again, this is kind of that gray area. I watched the Gary V, look him up, I watched the Gary V video this morning and he was talking about there’s black and white things to do, go do a Facebook ad or go do a Google ad or go to Googlemybusiness.com. That’s black and white. Well, a lot of these other things are kind of gray, and you have to kind of decipher what this means, but probably one of the most powerful things you can do is specialize. So if I say a tissue, what’s the first brand that pops in your head? It’s a very specialized brand, right? And if you can specialize your brand, so there’s a lot of ways to do that, we’ll talk about different ways to do that, but if you can focus in on what you do and who you are, it makes it a lot easier to market and promote.
So yes, you’re a sign shop and you sell yard signs online, or you’re a promo products distributor and you sell pens online or something like that. Sure, of course the whole United States of America, maybe North America, maybe the world is your customer. But if you go at it in that respect, and honestly, if you’re like watching this video and some of this stuff is new to you, it’s going to be awfully challenging. I mean you are taking the Giant’s head on. Don’t do that. Find a little niche, a little part of the market that you can specialize in, and we’ll talk about different ways to do that here in just a minute. And then that way you can really target in on the content, the long tail keywords that mean something to a smaller group of people. You can be everything to a small group instead of nothing to everyone.
So what are the long tail keywords? Long tail keywords are again, more specialized keywords. So we might say pen, the word pen, if we’re going to promo product world, which if you’re in a sign shop or print shop, it’s easy to relate to this, but if you’re thinking about a pen, that is a very broad word. And if you can actually go see through the Google keyword planner how many searches for the word pen are done annually in a month. But then getting a little more specialized, if we want a blue click pen, we’re getting even further specialized, and so those kinds of things become the long tail keyword. So I want a blue click pen with a metal barrel and gold trim that writes and reads or something like that, and if that’s your product, and you have a page on your site devoted to that, chances are pretty good that you can rank first for that.
Now the volume of people searching for that might not be enough, and that’s kind of where you figure out where your specialization happens. Those kinds of things you can go and I know this is cheesy, but if somebody wanted to dominate the blue click pen with red ink market right now, you probably could accomplish that. That’s awfully broad, and it’s a terrible example, but if you think about how narrow you can get, where you’d still have enough customers to service your business or to support your business rather, that’s kind of as deep as you want to go. The further you can specialize, especially in today’s world, generally the more successful you’re gonna find your marketing is, and that’s why there’s less competition.
[24:19] Specialized- Geography
James: So geography can be kind of difficult depending on where you’re at like if you’re in Omaha, Nebraska or a larger community. But if you’re a small town, then specializing in geography for a sign shop or an ad agency, or a promotional products distributor, there’s a chance that you might be one of two in there and so you could go for that. The nice thing about that is you’re kind of a close knit community. So if you are the one sign shop in town, then obviously this is the path that you could take.
Gene: We do see this too in larger metros, right? There’ll be somebody, or if you think about the five boroughs of New York, maybe you can’t specialize in your whole city, maybe just being part of a suburb or something like that.
James: About an hour before this, we were on a call with our real estate agent plus a bunch of other people for the building. And Gene was mentioning earlier that we have kind of an environmental issue that we were working through on the building that we’re trying to solve. So we needed to get a quote for radon mitigation systems, which in Omaha there’s like, I don’t know, 50 of them that can come out and put a radon system in. But there’s only like two or three that can do commercial radon mitigation systems, and so those guys, those three that do that are very specialized in their geography for that long tail keyword of commercial building radon mitigation system. So just an example of that.
[25:53] Specialize- Product Mix
Gene: Product mix would be another way to specialize. And that was kind of what we were talking about with this blue click pen with red ink or something like that, kind of get into a specialized product mix. So perhaps you want to sell promotional product type coffee mugs or whatnot, and you’ll have a nice range or nice array of a specific type of product. Or in our example on the slide there, stress relievers, you’re going to be the best source for stress relievers anywhere. We’ve got some really powerful sign shops in town that are very specialized, they do vehicle wraps and that’s like all they do. Well, when somebody is looking for a vehicle wrap, there’s a ton of shops that’ll do them, but the big one that I’m thinking about here in Omaha is the go-to for a vehicle wrap. And so you see those kinds of things, it’s easier to brand with a specialized product mix.
[27:10] Specialize- Industry
Gene: This kind of talks about the radon thing that James was talking about earlier, but specializing in industry. So if you are already familiar with an unrelated industry, that’s why we have the quick little example is the pediatric dentist at the bottom.
James: Yeah, so if you wanted to sell to just pediatric dentists, there are Facebook groups out there with pediatric dentists on there, and so you could figure out how to get into that Facebook group. You know, just like us, being a trade printer, we have found all the Facebook groups or as many Facebook groups as we can with our potential customers. So sign shops, promotional products distributors, ad agencies, stuff like that; basically all our target customers that we have. It’s important for us to stay active on that. And it allows us to be focused in, we have our client base there that we can talk to, that we can work with, that we can help through problems. It’s extremely valuable to find those.
Gene: Yeah, so the goal would be to find or establish that expert status within your industry. So there are sign and promo products businesses that just sell to schools. And there’s actually a lot of them, so that might be more challenging to specialize in. But then there are others that just sell to lawn care companies, there are some that just sell to auto dealerships. There are some that just sell to professional services, so they do promo products for attorneys and doctors and accountants and things like that. And so picking an industry that is unrelated but maybe you have an in already, maybe you have come into the printing industry, but you were in the restaurant industry before, you were an accountant before or something like that. That’s a really great in to become the expert in that industry in terms of signage or promotion or printing or whatever kind of product you’re offering.
James: Yeah, we see that a lot where we have distributors that specialize in specific industries, you know, the ag industry is huge.
Gene: They only sell to the ag industry and they’re huge, they sell tons of product. And so that really helps to top of mind awareness when you’ve got an ag executive or agriculture, like the farming and stuff.
James: Yeah, and creating your content too, can be based around that specific industry. You know, it’s easy to shoot videos talking about how to install a sign on a post for a corn seed row or something like that, or just whatever industry it is. Something specific, and if you’re focused on that, if you’re laser focused on that, that’s powerful.
Gene: Yeah, and again, the more specific you can get with that. And we’re reading these slides as you are, we wrote this like years ago and we’re looking at it, it’s like oh yeah, that’s still a good idea today. I hope. Again though, going back to the specialization and if you watched any of our past videos, it’s kinda like circling in and finding these narrow channels that really work for you. There are certain industries, again, the schools, auto dealerships, things like that, tons of competition, even in like the print and promo world for auto dealers, tons of competition, but you get more specific to it. Maybe all you service is a certain type of auto dealer, maybe a used European car auto dealer, right? So getting more specific will help you with ultra targeted marketing and make it work better.
[31:08] Specialize- Pick a Network
James: It’s always good to pick a network. Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube. Gene has got on here 1 post to 10 networks is not as good as 10 posts to 1 network. And so you can branch out a little bit, you can have a few networks that you do. We advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.
Gene: We have a person, I mean Bridget is pretty much devoted to generating content for this network, and if you’re a one person shop…
James: Yeah, but the big thing is if you post like once a month or something that you don’t really become like that well-known person for that. But if you post good/useful stuff every single day or every other day or even just consistently over and over again, where people kind of see stuff. And if you don’t post as often, boost your posts so that they show up a little bit more but then you just kind of become known for that. I think back on when I was getting ready, I have some damage on my driveway and there’s a company here in Omaha that is just like all over the place with their Google ads and their Facebook ads and stuff. And the second that I saw that, I remember seeing their ad like three different places, so they just became the person to know.
Gene: Top of mind awareness.
James: Yeah exactly, and obviously relating that back to our industry, sign shop. A lot of sign orders and a lot of promo orders are done on just a whim where somebody is like we need hats or we need this or something. TJ is on here, he wants to be able to send me a hat because the Buckeyes beat the Huskers, and so he needs a custom hat for that. So TJ is ordering that so that he can have it drop-shipped to me, to make fun of me for it. But anyways, so he’ll use somebody that he knows, that is known whether he knows them in person or he knows him through social media or whatever.
Gene: We’ve heard this before that you have to see something seven times or you have to see an ad seven times. Whether it’s 7, 4 or 19, it’s true, there has to be some familiarity with it before somebody feels comfortable buying from you. And so that goes back to the 10 posts to 1 network is far better than 1 post to 10 different networks. Because if they’re on Facebook regularly, for example, when you’re posting to Facebook regularly, then they’re going to see your ad over and over again. It’s a mistake that I see a lot of small businesses make all the time where they’re like, well how can I get the broadest reach? How can I get this one ad to the most people? Well that doesn’t work. What you really want to do is you want to target now and get a select group of a few people and show them a lot of ads. And that’s going to get you a better ROI (return on investment) on your marketing and advertising. Every time, it’s like a law of business. Well I don’t know, somebody will prove me wrong, but yeah.
James: Well going back, you gotta focus kinda where your customers are too. And what we said earlier, where if you got groups, and there are industry groups for every single industry and there’s dozens, if not more for every single group on there. And you can find them, advertise to them and talk to them, help them; pay dividends.
[34:24] Join Discussion
James: So this kind of goes back to what we were talking about a little bit before, you find groups, you find places to have discussions. You know, we have several Facebook pages, several blogs and stuff that we follow that we’re religiously posting on and stuff. We all kind of pick our own as to what we prefer. I’m more on Facebook groups and stuff like that, Gene is on some blogs and stuff that he kinda message boards.
Gene: Signs101.
James: Yeah, and so you just gotta find what’s on there and you build a little bit of a report where you’re kind of known as the yard sign guy. Or you’re kind of known as a sticker guy or something, or you’re known as a person that can help with this. And so it’s so important to kind of build that reputation up online and in-person as well.
Gene: Well, it goes back to specializing, if you’re specialized in something, say geography, so you’re maybe posting to a local message board, or maybe your next door app or something like that. And I hope you guys can hear me when I like mumble off like that, I think you actually probably have to turn your volume up, so I’m sorry for that. I’m going to try not to do that anymore. But specialization helps you figure out where to go post. So if Google My Business is your first bit of homework and maybe updating your Yelp profile. Yes, your Yelp profile, still do that even if you’re a sign shop or a printer, it’s not just for restaurants. That’s probably the first thing you should do, but then the second thing you can kind of go do quickly is figure out what networks you’d like to join. And then the key to this is not to jump on there.
If the first thing you do is jump on there and start spamming these networks, what’s going to happen? They’re gonna kick you off, or people are just gonna ignore you. You want to become a really good source for information, that’s critical. Like answer questions, do some research. If somebody asks a question that you know the answer to because it’s part of your industry, make a video and post a video answer, do stuff like that. It’s free other than your time, and it can really build a lot of credibility. And then every once in a while, an opportunity will arise to say ‘Hey, I’m looking for stickers, I’m looking for pens. I’m looking for promo idea.’ Oh yeah, hey, I’m here.
James: Why do we start a business? To solve a problem
Gene: Yes, yes. Business is problem-solvers.
James: Yes, exactly.
[36:42] Write Articles
Gene: This is another idea for content. You can write articles, there’s a bunch of places and we have them listed here- LinkedIn, SlideShare, Medium, Blogger. Just set a goal to write regularly if you enjoy writing, and if you don’t enjoy writing, make videos, do something like that. James and I really kind of sat down and we said well let’s do a live stream and see, and that’s kind of what we’re doing here. But creating kind of deep-dive articles or deep-dive content can be quite useful. You might not see the view counts go way up. Or if you really get deep into a subject or a topic, you may not see the view counts go way up, or you might not get a ton of readers, but chances are the people who are being drawn to that are very much focused on what you’re offering.
I’m trying to think of some examples of like an article that a sign shop might write for a specific industry. I keep kind of going back to promo products and I know we have a ton of customers who are focused on promo products. But if you are selling a lot of promo products and you’re working with a specific industry, let’s go back to pediatric dentistry, you know, writing some articles on giveaways and little takeaway stuff to leave on your counter.
James: Kind of like case studies. And a lot of times suppliers can help with this. If you go back and not to like move to a different supplier or industry, but if you go to your pen supplier. Or you go to your stress relief supplier, and you say, do you guys have any metrics on what this has done for your business or something, or what happens to the end users business when they do this? Maybe you guys can come up with something there or you ask the dentist that you’re working with, or the company that you’re working with, and you say hey, what was it like before this? What was it like after this? And you kind of write a case study where you talk about that, and it just helps kind of secure a little bit of data behind a product that you’re selling and stuff. And showing that to somebody else, they might find value in that.
Gene: Knowing that 87% of all statistics are made up, what you can do is create long, drawn-out and reports of statistical advantages of using your product. I mean, 37% of people recognize a pen the second they hold it, 43% of people will enter a restaurant solely based on the signage.
James: They don’t have to know where your…
Gene: No, no, don’t don’t lie. Just ignore that last bit.
James: I was just gonna say they don’t have to know your audience.
Gene: My toddler saw the sign because it was red and we went inside.
James: I touch every single sign that I see to figure out how it’s printed. So those all grabbed my attention.
[39:34] Make a Product Intro Video
James: Make a product or intro video, these are easy, especially with the devices in your pockets. You know, those big camcorders you guys carry those around, shoot videos about different products, shoot videos about your processes and stuff. People love to see how it’s made. Every single time that we do a product video on our printer or something like that, people love to see that kind of stuff because it’s cool. It’s American manufacturing at its finest. That’s why when we first started this kind of thing, one of our first topics on the live-stream was a sign shop is true. American manufacturing is a very entrepreneurial industry and stuff, and there’s a lot that you can kind of show off in your shop. Whether you’re weeding and masking vinyl or you’re designing artwork or something, and you’re doing like a screencast, there’s just so much to show, and that kind of stuff just gets people excited. It’s fun to watch.
Gene: Yeah, absolutely. I watch how it’s made videos with my daughter like every day, she’s six years old and she just loves it. So getting into that kind of stuff is really easy, should be very easy for you to do. And then the other cool thing is you can kind of tie that in, especially if you’re promoting a product. So if you’re a sign shop or whatnot, and you’re promoting a sign you’re making for somebody, you can also tie that promotion into the customer that you’re making the sign for. So if it’s another local customer, you kind of take that brand recognition and you combine it with yours and theirs and everybody kind of wins from something like that.
James: Yeah, and there are so many people in this industry that creates something really amazing. You guys will do an office front where you have nice 3d letters and stuff like that, and taking videos of how that kind of stuff has done and what it looks like after, taking photos, talking about that stuff, it gives people other ideas that helps generate revenue as well, and just generate some traction. And so it doesn’t hurt to do it, it’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s free.
Gene: So we say 10 minutes of editing here, what we mean by that is really, especially when you’re first starting out, don’t take a bunch of time to edit the video and try and get it perfect. If you can’t, shoot something and edit it in 10 minutes and get it out. And then the next thing is, and something to consider is that you need to upload this video multiple times directly to the platforms. So if you’re promoting on LinkedIn, upload it directly to LinkedIn, if you’re promoting on YouTube or well anywhere else, Facebook, upload it directly to Facebook. And one of the big reasons for that is auto-play. So if you’re scrolling through and you take a YouTube video and you upload it to Facebook or LinkedIn, it’ll show you a thumbnail and it’ll be right there, but it won’t start playing automatically when you’re scrolling on your feed. But if you upload it directly to the platforms, it starts playing automatically, so you get a little more engagement that way. So take the time, after you’ve made one of these two minute videos, three minute videos, something like that, upload it directly to all the platforms. You’re going to share those view counts and that’s okay. Again, this goes back to making it easiest for the user. If somebody’s scrolling Facebook and you want to take two minutes of their attention, the best thing to do is to put the video right on Facebook servers.
James: And you can, if you’re on YouTube, if you’re uploading or even like Facebook or LinkedIn, if you’re doing that, link back to your website as to what that product is. If you’ve got an about page or something like that, or just a specific product page, link back to that, that’s all the juice that helps you conjure attraction.
Gene: And so we said this was going to be a shorter video, and that was a total fabricated lie.
James: Oh Jesus, 33:41. Okay, we’ll try to hurry.
[43:01] Make a Company Intro Video
Gene: So instead of a product intro video or product explanation video.
James: Yeah, talk about yourself, talk about what you guys do, show your shop, just make something that’s kind of a candid video where you do that. We’ve done a few of those and they always kind of seem to get some good traction. People like those, and they’re kind of cool. We’re small businesses, it’s good to show the owners, show your staff, get them to talk and stuff.
Gene: Yeah, and that’s a really great point, don’t try and act bigger than you are. I mean, really let people know that you’re a small business and you’re in their community and you care about the community and you grew up there or whatever it is. I mean, those kinds of things are really important, and that’s how you beat out these bigger guys. It’s one thing that some of the massive players can’t do, I mean they’re just big, so be small, and that’s all right.
James: Yeah, that’s a competitive advantage.
[43:56] Takeaway
Gene: Take away- specialize, become the expert, generate as much content as you can. And then I think really one thing to remember about this is there is no wrong path, right? Get on a path that works for you. I don’t personally get on Facebook a lot, I’m not Facebook-driven. So if I was a one man shop, I probably wouldn’t advertise on Facebook, but I like Signs101, I like writing articles and getting stuff to get Google to link to us. So that’s the path I would take and that’ll work, that’ll work for us. James really loves doing trade shows and things like that. So if he was a one man shop, I think he’d probably be traveling the country doing trade shows and that would work, it would work fine, but pick your path and stick to it. And right at that moment where it really feels like it’s dragging on and you want to quit, that’s kind of when you’ll start to see that, I think, traction take hold. So just stick to it, specialize, and narrow your focus.
James: Yeah and just keep going. The most important thing is pick up the pen and get started and keep going, don’t stop.
Gene: You gotta hustle, got to get up, wake up tomorrow and do it. So takeaways again, your homework, if you haven’t set up your Google My Business thing, go do that, go check out Yelp.
James: Update your profiles, make sure that everything’s up to date; easy stuff.
Gene: If you want one last little tip. Look up Moz Local, and they’ll give you a list of things. They do have a service for like a hundred dollars a year where they’ll update a bunch of that stuff for you. If that’s worth it, you can do that, but otherwise get in there and do that. And then the next step after that is to get on message boards, get on Facebook and find some discussions to start joining, adding value to it. Add value, that’s the most important part.
James: Thanks for joining us. Put any questions you guys have in the comments, and we can try to answer them in the coming weeks, or maybe that could be a show topic for us.
Gene: Next week is Thanksgiving, so we will be gorging on Turkey during the show next week, but then we’ll see you in two weeks. Will that be December by then?
James: Close.
Gene: It’s going to be close, okay. Anyway, see you in two weeks!
James: Cool, thank you!