March 19, 2025 • 46 mins
Think you just need a website and customers will magically show up? Believe that SEO is a one-and-done task? You’re not alone—but these are just some of the biggest misconceptions businesses have about online marketing.
In this episode of Over The Bull, we’re cutting through the nonsense and breaking down the most common marketing myths that are costing businesses time, money, and leads. From social media and Google Ads to SEO and content strategy, we’ll unpack why these misunderstandings exist and what to do instead.
If you’re tired of wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work, this one’s for you.
Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.
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Episode Transcript
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Introduction (00:00):
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
Ken (00:10):
The biggest marketing misconceptions on this episode
of Over the Bull.
Welcome back.
In the first episode, we talkedto you about us letting go of a
client.
That's kind of a shockerbecause most people don't want
to talk about these things.
Agencies want you to think thatthey're spotless and everything
goes great.
Everybody gets a five-starexperience and everybody grows.
(00:30):
In reality, that simply doesn'thappen.
You go back and listen to thefirst episode, you're going to
be able to kind of see some ofthe tactics used to steal your
time and your resources andthings you can do to be more
successful on the internet.
Now, with that being said,let's jump right in to common
marketing misconceptions and whythey're wrong.
(00:52):
Now, before we talk about theactual conceptions, let's talk
about Where do they begin?
They usually begin from twoplaces.
Well, maybe three, but we'lltry to cover all those.
Number one are designers thatare largely ignorant of
marketing.
Now, there is something inbusiness called the law of the
(01:13):
lid.
The law of the lid basicallymeans that you only know what
you know, and when you get to acertain point, you cease to be
valuable in giving knowledge inthat particular area.
Now, we all have our laws ofthe lid.
I've got mine.
You've got yours.
Everyone's got theirs.
Now, the question is, is whereis their lid in marketing?
(01:35):
And so someone trying to sellweb design but doesn't know a
lot about search engineoptimization, paid advertising,
or really good squeeze pages,guess what?
They're going to give you atemplate.
They're going to give yougeneric content.
They're going to give youthings that are not capable of
being successful for yourbusiness.
They won't contribute.
The other is lies by omission.
(01:57):
Yes, it's true.
A lot of people do know whatthe reality of the Internet is,
but they also know it's astumbling block to get you to
sign up with them.
And so if they share thereality, it's not as fun as the
fantasy.
And if you come in with afantastical idea of what the
Internet's supposed to do, andyou just got through a bad
experience, then they mayminimize that as well.
(02:20):
Now, you go through that a fewtimes, you spend a lot of money.
And so you want to make surethat you're getting this clear
idea.
And then the last one, the oneI just thought of literally, as
I said, too, in the verybeginning here, and that is the
mythology of the Internet.
All throughout history, peoplehave followed mythologies and
(02:41):
the mythology of the Internet iscompelling.
I mean, let's face it, we allhave ideas of what the Internet
should do.
And we're all told about thesegreat stories of what the
Internet does for other people.
And so it's natural for us tothink that that mythology is
true.
However, the people that makethe mythologies up have a vested
(03:02):
interest in pushing thosemythologies because they want
you to also believe them so thatyou spend more money in those
mythologies.
Now, this could be designers.
This could be marketing people.
This could be the companiesthat actually sell paid
advertising.
The whole thing could be theemperor has no clothes in a lot
of cases.
So are you alone?
(03:23):
Are you the guy that has badluck?
Are you the guy that is missingout on the internet?
Odds are, probably you're notthe only guy in your boat.
Matter of fact, I would arguemost businesses are in your
boat.
because they're falling prey toone or more of these three
ideas that can kill a business.
(03:43):
Now, with that being said,let's jump right into the actual
misconceptions, the actualmythology of what's going on
with the Internet.
So, number one is, if I buildit, they will come.
I can't believe this stillexists on the Internet, and I
can't believe that there aresome companies who are
(04:05):
absolutely blowing up under thismyth.
I mean, some of them advertiseon the Super Bowl, for goodness
sakes.
So what am I talking about?
The idea is if you build awebsite, then people are going
to magically find you.
This means that, you know,you're going to have someone put
together a website.
(04:25):
You're going to post it on theInternet or publish it on the
Internet.
And once it's published on theInternet, then people are just
going to start Googling andfinding you just haphazardly.
Now, this is absolutely nottrue.
When you think of the internet,you think of like this noisy
marketplace where people areyelling and screaming and trying
to sell their goods andservices.
(04:45):
And then imagine that you don'thave a voice or arms or legs
and you're stuck in a corner.
That's a little more like whatit's like if you don't have
marketing.
So when you think of a website,do not think that a website by
itself is going to do what youwant it to do.
Now, let me go a little deeperwith this.
(05:05):
These do-it-yourself websitebuilders, when you talk from
agency to agency, inside, wekind of, you know, we know the
real deal.
And so we kind of laugh atthese ideas.
Now, I know that's kind ofhard, but it's true.
Now, why is that?
Because the first step inbuilding any website is
(05:28):
planning.
a lot of planning.
It's looking at your business,your competitor's business.
It's looking at differentstyles, your demographic, your
audience, and then building awebsite based upon that
criteria.
It's never choose a prettytemplate.
It's never use let AI contentgenerate your pages.
(05:48):
It's never use stockphotography across the board on
your website.
Those things don't work.
Matter of fact, if you startout that way and then you start
working with a marketingcompany, odds are they're going
to dismantle it and have tocompletely rebuild it again
because your designer didn'thave the marketing experience
they need.
If you're doing it yourself,unless you're a marketing
(06:09):
expert, you're definitely notgoing to cover all the bases.
That's the hard reality.
Guys like me, we've spent theyears we have because we know
that there's a lot of thingsthat go into websites.
For example...
Here's a freebie.
The top of your page shouldalways be in motion.
The middle of your page shouldbe more logic.
And the bottom of your pageshould be more reinforcement.
(06:32):
That's just kind of a standardthing most professionals know
today.
The other thing is sitearchitecture and how you build
it, the focus of each page, whatyou name each page, the URL of
each page.
All of that stuff goes into it.
So this leads you to, well, butcan't professionals use
(06:53):
do-it-yourself website builders?
That's like saying, wouldMichelangelo use an eight-pack
box of crayons if he's got hispreferred medium?
Well, of course he would.
So it's the same thing.
So anybody that's claiming tobe a professional but is jumping
into do-it-yourself builders,you should think twice about
(07:14):
that.
Again, this is over the bull.
This is the hard stuff, right?
This is the reality.
And this is why most businessesfail.
You know, they have this ideathat they build a website and
it's just going to work.
Or they throw together a bunchof pages and it's just going to
magically do what they want itto do.
It does not happen like that.
So what's number two?
(07:36):
SEO is a one-time thing.
Now, what's interesting aboutthis is the question itself is
kind of weird.
But the myth is...
We optimized the site lastyear.
We're good, right?
Or we optimized it one time.
Absolutely not.
Now here's the really strangepart of this.
When you build a website,before you actually build the
(07:59):
pages out, before you actuallywork on the structure, you do a
lot of SEO work before you doit.
Even if you're not going to doa full-fledged SEO effort, you
really want to make sure thateverything is in its proper
place.
And so, most people that fail,they'll have a website built
(08:21):
with a bunch of pages, and thosepages are completely structured
in the wrong way.
Google would have a hard timeunderstanding it, as would your
customers, and then it has to berebuilt.
Then if you trust your SEO guyto build it and he doesn't know
design, then you're going tomiss out on all the design
stuff.
So there is this kind of Reesecup, peanut butter, chocolate
(08:43):
thing.
So the idea is SEO, there areparts that are a one-time thing,
which are the initial setup,but it's constantly recurring,
evolving, and changing.
So here's an idea.
One thing that we do is contentmonitoring and updates.
Meaning that there may be anarticle that was posted that was
(09:05):
ranking really well on Googleand driving traffic.
But we look at the qualityscore and it goes down over a
period of time because thecompetition changes and
therefore what you need to do onthat particular page needs to
change too.
So what we do is we regularlyaudit critical pages and then we
monitor where their position ison the web and then we make
(09:29):
changes to those positioning andthat's constant.
It's not a one-time thing.
It's not a write a blog articleand it's magically going to
bring you people forever andever.
There are tools we have wherewe can actually see when
competition edits their contentto what degree they edit their
content.
It's a fight.
I mean, clawing and scratchingto get your way to the top and
(09:51):
then constantly maintaining itto stay at the top.
Now, part of this could be,well, what about title tags?
What about the meta stuff?
You know, you probably heardthese words that sound kind of
scary, you know, title tags andmeta descriptions.
Well, if you really think aboutit, a title tag is simply like
the title of a book and a metadescription is simply the
(10:13):
synopsis of the book.
Every web page you have has gota different title and a
different synopsis.
If they're too close, it couldcause Google to get confused.
And so the idea is maybe thatsynopsis needs to change too.
Maybe that title of the bookisn't as good as it used to be.
And so those things can changetoo.
SEO is a long game and it's anever-changing game.
(10:36):
Even if you did everythingperfect and even if your
competition didn't change, otherpeople didn't post content to
compete, just in the arena ofcontent marketing alone,
Google's algorithms changebecause they're out looking for
the bad guys.
By the way, here's a quick sidenote.
I did publish a press releaseearlier this year about what we
(10:58):
call PBNs, private blognetworks.
Private blog networks could bedetrimental to your business,
and a lot of SEO firms use thesethings.
So if you go tointegrisdesign.com, go to the
About section, you can find ourpress release.
I'll try to put in thefootnotes here too, and you can
actually read what a PBN is.
(11:18):
It's beyond the scope of thismeeting, but you want to be
careful because, again, peoplewho are service providers try to
cut corners as much as they canwhen they can because the more
time they spend on something,the less profitable your project
is.
That's a very key point inevery single thing we're talking
about today.
Now, let's move on.
(11:40):
Social media is free marketing.
Now, the myth is that if youjust post on Facebook or
Instagram, the sales are goingto magically pop up.
Maybe if you get thosefollowers on your page, you're
going to reach those people andyou're going to be able to get
that free marketing push.
So I just did a Google searchjust to find out what AI is
(12:05):
telling me.
I wanted to just see what thecurrent numbers were.
And so what I'm looking at issomewhere between 2% and 6.5% of
people that like your businesspage are going to actually see
your post.
So what does that mean?
You got 100 people, two toroughly seven people are going
to see it.
Now it's according to theinternet I'm looking at right
(12:28):
now.
So the idea that if you gain alot of followers and then you're
going to gain a lot of salesthrough those followers, it's
relative, right?
I mean, what are you reallygoing to sell by doing
absolutely nothing?
So this moves into the idea ofposting, boosting posts, also
running advertisement withinMeta, which is, you know,
(12:48):
obviously Facebook and Instagramand a few other guys.
And there are certainstrategies that work really
good.
Now, the problem is that socialmedia marketing, when you do
advertising and you do itthrough Google, there are
certain things that you dobecause some of the data shows
that over, I think it's around60% of the success of an ad
(13:12):
comes down to the creativity ofit.
And a lot of it comes down tovideo marketing, believe it or
not, creating video ads.
And so, um, if you want alittle side homework, you can
look up the, uh, the ABCDs ofvideo marketing with, uh,
Google.
It's really interesting.
It stands for, uh, attention,branding, connection, and
direction.
(13:32):
Um, Meta also gives you someclues in their 2023, um, manual
on how to do creative, which waspretty good.
I used to minimize howeffective I thought their
suggestions were historically,but the 2023 guide gives some
really good information aboutwhen the brand should pop up and
(13:54):
things.
So we have this combination weuse using both recommendations.
And through trial and error, wefound out what really kind of
works.
But here's the weird thing.
Let me throw this out at you.
We're working with a trailermanufacturer.
And with that trailermanufacturer, one thing we've
run into was meta ads.
(14:17):
And we did these reallypolished looking ads.
And they weren't performingthat well.
So we met with the client andwe talked about what they've
done historically.
And what they did was theyactually did these kind of, not
clumsy, but kind of rudimentarylooking ads that look like
classified ads.
And what we found within theirdemographic was that people are
(14:39):
looking for the best deals.
And so polished ads appeared tobe cuing them into thinking
that their product was moreexpensive.
And so what we're doing iswe're running continual
experiments because it's stillyoung in its project age.
But we're running these ads tofind out maybe if the kind of
rough-looking ads outperform thereally clean-looking ads.
(15:01):
Now, here's the weird thingabout it.
In marketing, we shouldn't carebecause the idea is to bring
people to the website and tomake a purchase.
You're not pay.
You're not get extra pointsbecause of your posturing or how
you do things in terms of likemarketing.
You know, the aesthetics beinga certain standard or whatever.
If poor aesthetics drivepeople, if rough cut videos work
(15:24):
better, then you should do therough cut videos.
And there's a whole segmentthat does this stuff.
So social media marketing isnot only is it not free, but
it's incredibly complicated.
And it requires a lot of trialand error in order to get that
kind of marketing really honedin and working.
So here's the next one.
More traffic equals more sales.
(15:47):
Absolutely not true.
It's never true.
Now, if we insert a word in themiddle of that, it can be true.
And that is more qualifiedtraffic equals more sales.
Now, in SEO, paid advertising,social media marketing, you name
(16:09):
it.
A lot of the game is they showyou the impressions.
You look at the number ofclicks.
You look at these other things.
But it doesn't equal moresales.
And that's because it'sunfocused traffic.
I would rather have a keywordphrase that is incredibly
targeted, that is right where weneed them in order for them to
(16:31):
make a purchase.
I'm going to qualify that in asecond.
Then I went for somethingreally ambiguous and loose.
So the analogy that I wouldgive a potential business is,
let's say we're running akeyword report and they're
selling shoes.
Now, the top keyword isprobably going to be shoes.
(16:51):
But if you can imagine someoneGoogles shoes and they're
looking for high-top basketballshoes.
And they run into shoes.
They're going to see everythingfrom women's shoes, men's
shoes, different styles ofshoes, colors of shoes, whatever
may have you.
So then what they'll do isthey'll refine their search.
The refined search may be bestshoes for basketball.
(17:15):
And then they're going to see abunch of different brands and
reviews and ratings.
Then they're going to dig alittle deeper.
And ultimately, they're goingto be at what we would call the
bottom of the funnel, which isbrand X reviews.
basketball shoes, whatever, youknow, near me or something like
that.
Or maybe they're going to go tosome of the popular buying
(17:35):
platforms like Amazon to lookfor those shoes.
And so the idea is we want tomake sure that we're at the
right place and time and givethe right value proposition and
make sure that we can at leastgive a compelling argument.
And even if we do everythingright, only a certain percentage
are going to buy from us.
So what I meant by moretraffic, more sales, and then I
(17:59):
said, well, rather highlytargeted, and I said, let me
qualify that.
So this is what I mean by that.
In marketing, there are twomain systems that we typically
refer to.
One is the sales funnel.
Now, the sales funnel goesthrough the process of someone
who typically goes fromunderstanding they need
(18:20):
something to making the purchaseto a follow-up.
The ecosystem, which is theother model, says that people
jump in and out of the, youknow, depending upon the model
you look at on the sales funnel,you know, how they transition
from understanding they needsomething to making the
purchase.
They may jump up and downseveral steps rather than making
(18:42):
a logical gradation to making apurchase.
Now what that means is thosekeywords also have to be
targeted.
but they could be higher funnelkeyword targeting.
But then again, if you'retargeting someone, like for
example, one of the steps isresearching options.
You know, you find out you gota problem and then you start to
(19:02):
research the different ways youcan resolve the problem or the
thing you need.
Now, if someone's in theresearching phase, the type of
content you would want to postat that researching phase would
be different than someonewilling to make a purchase.
Because if they're willing tomake a purchase, but you're
addressing them from a highersales funnel standpoint, you may
(19:23):
push them back up the salesfunnel and cost yourself a sale.
So you see it gets a little bitcomplicated, but regardless,
all the funneling from top tobottom and where they're at in
that sales funnel process shouldbe qualified and should be
targeted.
So I want to make sure to letyou know that you just don't
want to target the bottom of thefunnel.
Those are typically moreexpensive.
(19:46):
They typically convert at ahigher rate.
But the higher funnel stuff mayconvert at a lower rate, but
it's also going to be cheaper.
And so if it's cheaper, you mayfind out that it converts at a
lower rate, but it's still morecost effective when you average
out the cost per sale.
So just stuff to think about.
Oh, the next one is very good,in my opinion.
(20:09):
It's Google Ads equals instantsuccess.
Now, the myth is...
you're going to run ads and beprofitable immediately.
Not the case.
It's absolutely not, especiallytoday, it's not the case.
Because now you have thingslike Google's artificial
intelligence, looking at howpeople use the internet, things
(20:32):
like that, where they're at inthe buying cycle, which ones
convert better based upon wherethat person's at in their buying
cycle and what they're doing.
And there's tons and tons offactors that go into it.
So now it does happen.
I'm not going to lie to you.
Sometimes, if it's a verysimple model, you may see
success early out.
Now, when I say simple, simpleis relative.
(20:55):
And so I've seen very simpleofferings that have a lot of
competition also require a lotof work.
Because it goes far and beyondjust running ads, putting a
bunch of text up, and publishingthem on the internet and
showing up on Google.
Remember, that's just the firststep.
They also are going to look atyour price value, should they
(21:16):
use you.
And the old adage is where ifyou can't distinguish yourself
from anybody else, they're goingto default to price.
And there's always going to besomebody willing to charge a
little bit less and go out ofbusiness a little bit quicker if
you leave it to that.
And so the idea is Google Ads,you're looking somewhere
typically between four or sixweeks or maybe longer.
(21:37):
which means you have to invest.
And the more you invest in it,the quicker you can learn.
And also the more differentcategories in which you
advertise in, those will alsorequire different budgets.
And so you want to be carefulabout someone that tells you
they're going to turn on ads andthen you're going to see this
magic.
Or if you bought into themythology that once you run ads,
(22:00):
it's going to magically happen.
Not the case.
You need an expert that's goingto go do it.
And here's a little side note.
When it comes to Google Ads,you can actually set them up
yourself.
But it's kind of like doing thedo-it-yourself website builder.
It's not going to work well.
When I've gone throughdifferent Google Ads training
and learning and everything, thedegree at which you set up a
(22:23):
campaign that's successful...
and you learn from requires alot of work and a lot of
expertise.
And so, yeah, you can do ityourself, but when you do, it's
probably not going to work asgood as if you have an expert
doing it for you.
That's just the way it is.
That's why we work hard to getour Google Ads partnership.
(22:43):
You've got to maintain acertain standard to keep that
partnership with Google.
And we do that because webelieve that it shows that we do
put the extra effort into ourGoogle Ads effort.
So here's the next one.
Email marketing is dead.
It doesn't work.
Now the myth is that no onereads them.
(23:04):
No one uses them.
Now the reality is emailmarketing could be the most
powerful tool for your business.
Now Obviously, puttingsomething on your website like
sign up for our newsletter isnot going to do the trick.
Now, what you want to do is youwant to make a compelling
reason for someone to sign upand share their email address.
(23:27):
Because in today's world,sharing an email is like sharing
money.
You don't want to do it thatoften and you're probably not
going to give your best emailaddress in some cases.
So what you want to do is youwant to make sure that what
you're offering is somethingthat somebody would want.
Now, the other side is you wantto make sure to build the right
processes in email marketing.
(23:49):
For example, the length of theemails, the call to action you
put in your emails, thefrequency of your emails,
automations.
You can automatically send outemails on a certain schedule.
And the idea is that you dowant to engage with people who
are interested in your product.
(24:09):
So there's another thing aboutemail marketing that's really
interesting.
Remember earlier we weretalking about the whole sales
funnel thing.
And we also talked about peoplewon't necessarily choose your
product even if you've doneeverything right.
Because people are people.
They can make bad choices.
They can decide to do somethingcompletely different just
(24:30):
because they happen to likesomething.
Now, but here's kind of thething.
When they come to your website,if you can make that email
offer something reallycompelling, then you do
something that normally youwouldn't do.
And that is capture a certainnumber of people's email
addresses that would havenormally left your website.
(24:50):
Then what you could do is youcould start marketing to them
through your business and thenmaybe capture some of those
people that weren't.
Now, we ran this test recentlyagain.
Now, we run a lot of these, butthis is just the most recent
one, was we have a client thathas a seasonal business.
Now, in their seasonalbusiness, it normally picks up,
(25:13):
you know, in the spring.
So we ran a very special offer,basically saying, are you
getting ready for the spring?
If so, share this, and whenyou're ready to make the
purchase or ready to moveforward, we'll We'll share this
out.
Now, I'm doing this very sloppybecause I don't want to give
away all the stuff we workedthrough with them.
But then what happened was westarted getting a lot of people
(25:36):
signing up.
And that's exactly what washappening.
They were looking, but theyweren't ready to make the
purchase.
And we captured a lot of emailaddresses of people who were in
that preparation phase.
Now, if they would have leftthe website...
then a large portion of themare never going to remember they
visited that website to beginwith.
But now we have the ability toreach out and make special
(25:59):
offers and understand them alittle bit better.
So email marketing is not deadby any stretch of the
imagination.
Now let's piggyback a littlebit on last week.
This does not mean you goacross the internet and you
start looking for emailaddresses and start sending
emails from like your...
regular email address, or eventhrough, you know, one of the
(26:23):
email services that are outthere, you know, like Constant
Contact, Active Campaign,MailChimp.
There's a bunch of other onesout there because those are not
for cold email marketing.
And that's what that's called.
You do not want to use them forthat.
Basically, what you want to dois you want to market.
You want to capture those emailaddresses legitimately, and
then you want to engage withthem.
(26:44):
I mean, do you really want yourbusiness to be associated as
the people that send out coldemails?
More than likely, you don't.
For me, like I told you lastweek, I block them.
I don't care what the offer is.
I don't care how much theypromise.
I don't care what they'll do.
I block them because they didnot respect my time.
(27:04):
You don't want to be on theother end of that.
And don't fall prey to it.
And then plus, if you send outbulk emails from your email, you
can actually get your emailwhere it's blocked on some of
the servers.
So be careful about that.
Oh, and now we're at one thathits home.
This one hit home actually acouple weeks ago.
And the idea is more quantityis better.
(27:27):
You know, the idea is crank outa lot of blog posts.
Now, what a lot of people aredoing are using artificial
intelligence to create theseposts.
Now, this is a horrible,absolutely horrible idea.
The idea is quality trumpsquantity.
And we have tools that can helpus understand effective, you
(27:51):
know, popular blog articles.
And then we can kind of gleanwhat's good from all those using
artificial intelligence andsome other tools.
We can build an outline.
We can determine the length ofthe article and also how many
times you should use certainwords and how many times you
should not use certain words.
And to modify and create thosearticles takes a lot of time to
(28:14):
do that kind of stuff.
And so it requires specialtools, special knowledge, things
like that.
Nothing crazy, but it's justsomething that an average
business doesn't want to taketime to learn.
But the idea that if you'regoing to think you're going to
just put up a bunch of AIcontent and publish it on a
(28:35):
website is probably one of theworst ideas you could possibly
do.
We had a client who...
wasn't sold on the idea that weshould focus on creating really
effective, optimized articlesand felt it was more important
to crank out a quantity ofarticles.
Now, when we met, I looked atthe articles and it was obvious
(29:00):
that they were all generated byChatGPT.
Now, ChatGPT can be a reallycool tool and we use it in a lot
of places.
Now, not in that case.
So the articles are basicallypublished or scheduled to be
published on her website usingthem.
And I can't quite talk her offthe ledge.
(29:20):
Like in her mind, it's just asthough quantity is going to
trump it.
And if we're not doing enoughin terms of quantity, then it's
not effective.
Now, this is absolutely untrue.
Proper, well-sought out,well-searched articles can be
very beneficial.
Now I'm going to give you anexample, not a promise, but just
(29:43):
an example of how effective itcan be.
Using some of the tools wehave, we're able to see what
competitors are publishing ontheir website that's bringing
them the most traffic.
Then what we can do is takethat article and then we can
reconstruct it but make it a lotbetter than we've had it.
(30:03):
Or they have it.
Then once we published thatarticle on the first index, no
joke, first time Google saw thatarticle, we were on the top
page.
Now, that's because we did alot of work on the front end of
this.
We did not just simply say,hey, create me an article with
this keyword phrase on it orcreate me this and then send
(30:27):
that as though it's uniquecontent.
Now, the sad truth is that Ihave seen some service providers
who are guaranteeing customcontent, and they're giving
unlimited revisions on thatcontent, and then they publish
it.
Now, think of it in terms of amodel.
(30:49):
If you own that business, wouldyou be able to give unlimited
revisions to content unless youwere using something like
artificial intelligence?
The answer is no.
I mean, the next worst casescenarios are using somebody
that's not familiar with yournative language.
And that's also going to bejust as bad.
Creating good content takes awhile.
(31:11):
I mean, you can spend an hour,two hours, maybe even longer
properly weighting, fine tuningand humanizing content based on
the best of outlines.
And so do not buy into this.
Do not do it.
You want quality over quantity.
And don't get fooled into thisAI content stuff.
There's too many people outthere trying to peddle it
(31:33):
because it's an easy bug.
Now, I'm going to retouch onsomething because this is huge.
And the idea that marketingshould bring instant results.
Absolutely, this is not true.
Marketing is a continualeffort.
And some of it's a long game.
Some of it's a midterm game.
(31:54):
And sometimes you just step upto the plate and you knock it
out of the ballpark and it justworks.
So this story goes back, gosh,probably three years.
We had a new guy come in.
He had a, you know, a starterbudget.
And when we first ran thecampaign, he made an
astronomical amount of sales offour first effort.
(32:17):
And we spent a lot of timeworking with him, trying to talk
him off the ledge of thinkingthat would always be his
results.
The reality is sometimes thoseearly success stories can be
hard because that sets a toneand that tone is unrealistic.
The reality is, is you need amidterm and a long-term gain.
(32:37):
And if you get some short-termsuccesses, then great.
That's just a little bitbetter.
But you don't ever want to bethe person who's in a position
where you've got a very limitedbudget, a finite amount of time,
and you're counting on thatHail Mary pass to somehow save
your business.
If you're looking for that andyou're trying to find someone to
(32:58):
be able to do that, keep inmind the odds are staggering
against you.
It really takes effort.
time, energy, a lot ofcreativity, and a lot of
massaging campaigns in order toget them effective.
Search engine optimizationstrategies are definitely the
long game.
I mean, you should look at atleast six months or more for
(33:20):
those.
Again, sometimes you may hitthe algorithm just right and you
may show up a little bitquicker than that, but we would
never sell it under thatpretense.
And we also sell it under theterms of gaining visibility and
not something ridiculous likebeing number one on Google for a
certain keyword phrase.
That kind of stuff is justsensationalism.
Now, here's the other thing.
(33:43):
Have you ever heard that yourcustomers don't use something
like LinkedIn or maybe Facebookor Instagram?
Now, here's the thing.
It's just like payments.
Some people like to pay withcredit cards, some cash, some
checks, some Venmo, some PayPal,some whatever, some bank
(34:04):
transactions, however they wantto do it.
It's kind of the same thingwith the way you market on the
Internet.
I've heard a lot of people saythat their people are not on
Facebook no more.
Probably more Instagram.
But it's like this concept thatthere's a certain demographic
in certain places where Andwhile that is true to a certain
extent, but to assume that theirclients don't reside in those
(34:28):
places is often a mistake.
And so the idea is kind oftwofold, because it's a
challenge.
Because the first challenge isyou really want to be everywhere
your clients are, and you wantto be able to measure how
successful each one of thoseplatforms are.
But the other side is, is Ifyou're a small business, you're
(34:50):
not going to be able to properlyinvest in all those efforts.
And so what you want to be ableto do is strategically choose
where you want to be on theInternet.
But really, that should comeoff a lot of professional
guidance.
And you should never just tryto be everywhere all the time
and definitely don't just thinkspinning up a business page on a
(35:12):
certain profile like X orFacebook is going to do anything
significant for your business,maybe even insignificant for
your business.
Matter of fact, if you don'ttake it seriously, people who
live on those platforms or spenda lot of time on them, they
won't see that you're seriousabout it and they may not even
trust your business because youdon't have the proper presence
(35:32):
on those platforms to beginwith.
So it's really important torealize that, yeah, your
customers may be there, but youneed to put a serious effort
where you're going to put thateffort and understand if you're
just trying to get a place, aspace holder on a certain
platform like X or Twitter,which is Twitter, Facebook or
(35:53):
whatever, then understand whereyou're at with those platforms
and understand what you'retrying to achieve.
Okay, it's time to break a lotof hearts with the last one.
And that is you can do ityourself for everything for your
business when it comes tomarketing and design.
You know what I'm talkingabout.
(36:13):
Those design programs out therethat's got all those templates.
Those website builders with allthose themes.
The start marketing in minutes.
Build your own Facebook page.
Boost your own post.
I get it.
I get it.
You're trying to avoid theexpertise of someone who lives
(36:35):
it.
Now, I will tell you that froman agency perspective, and
talking to literally I don'tknow how many businesses since
2006, I have yet to run across abusiness that has come to us
and has said theirdo-it-yourself effort worked.
(36:58):
I've not run into that yet.
Now, they may have had somesuccesses, but they're not good
successes, and they're notcumulative successes.
What I mean by that is they'renot building and getting
stronger.
They hold on tighter to thelittle bit of things that
they're doing that works,unknowingly not knowing what's
(37:21):
not working.
I know that's a weird thing tosay, but basically they just
don't know what they should get.
And so the temptation...
is that in the commercials forsome of the stuff is just so
clever.
They'll have somebody on therethat you look at and you go, I'm
probably smarter than thatperson, and if they can do it, I
(37:42):
can do it.
Now, that's why they have thosepeople on the do-it-yourself
ads and commercials.
They want you to believe thatthat person was able to do it,
and they're crazy successful,And they want you to think that
a large part or a portion oftheir success is because of the
things they did themselves usingthat stuff.
This is probably the hardestmyth to try to convey to
(38:07):
someone.
Now, here's why.
Because they see us as having adog in the fight.
Meaning that if I'm talking tosomeone one-on-one and I say,
you don't want to usedo-it-yourselfers.
they're probably thinking intheir mind, well, this is an
agency that don't want us to.
They want us to spend moneywith them.
(38:29):
Now, the reality is, is thatI've seen it.
I've seen everyone that comesin and out of this office, in
Zooms, on phone consultations,on everything.
I've seen it.
And the reality is, is no onehas come across my desk that has
ever had great success withthese programs.
(38:49):
It's something cheap.
So I'll leave you with this.
If you have the choice ofbuying something cheap, but that
cheap thing would not get youwhat you're trying to achieve,
would you ever buy the cheapthing to begin with?
Obviously, the answer is no.
No one would do that.
I mean, why would they dosomething like that?
(39:10):
And so the idea are thesebuilders are cleverly built
where they make you think thatyou can accomplish something
that professionals have spent along time trying to perfect.
I mean, going back and, youknow, again, I mentioned Edward
Bernays in the last episode.
You look at some of thedifferent tactics and strategies
and then just knowing theamount of time and effort and
(39:33):
energy you have to brainstormand change things and alter them
in order to make themeffective.
It's just not there.
And don't buy into this AIthing.
Now, granted, AI is doing somePretty incredible things.
Matter of fact, some amazingthings.
But it's not simplifying theprocesses.
(39:55):
It's actually adding a lot ofcomplexity and requires a lot
more expertise in order toharness the power of artificial
intelligence in a meaningfulway.
So just using AI for verysimplistic thoughts is not going
to work.
And ultimately, let's say itdoes work.
It's kind of like that if, asof this point, now I don't know
(40:18):
what's going to happen in thenext year or two, everything's
growing exponentially.
But if you look at it likethis, let's assume that you want
a million dollars and youharness that million dollars and
you're able to do what you wantto.
Now imagine everybody on theplanet gets a million dollars.
How valuable is a milliondollars?
(40:39):
Well, everybody's essentiallyat zero point, right?
So, It's a million dollarsmeans nothing, but a million
dollars in one means a littlesomething, and then a million
dollars in two, and et cetera,et cetera, all the way up.
And so it's kind of the samething with artificial
intelligence.
As we're seeing it develop,we're seeing that it can be used
(41:01):
in a broad swath of differentways, some bad, some good.
But ultimately, even if itworked perfect for everybody,
there's got to be something thatmakes it unique Otherwise,
everybody's just at the samelevel they were to begin with,
just a much more sophisticatedstarting point.
Now, I could be wrong, butthat's kind of the way I'm
(41:21):
seeing it as of today.
So, what are our takeaways?
Obviously, the big takeaway isdon't use do-it-yourself
builders.
Look, you're listening to apodcast.
I don't know you.
You probably never will reachout to us.
I have nothing to gain bytelling you not to use
do-it-yourself website builders.
other than giving you aneffective resource in this
(41:44):
podcast.
The internet is a modern-daymythology.
It's propped up by powerfulcompanies that are offering
services, big tech companies,whatever, do-it-yourself
builders, and even people whoprovide services that want to
(42:04):
prop up the mythology of theinternet in order to sell what
they're trying to sell to you.
Now, the reality is theinternet is a powerful tool, an
incredibly powerful tool, ifit's harnessed in the right way
with the right expectations.
(42:25):
If you miss the mark on that,you're going to be disappointed,
frustrated, aggravated, and youmay go out of business trying
to chase something that trulydoes not exist.
So to be successful, and I knowwhat you're doing.
I mean, business owners, man, Ican tell you, I've sat around
(42:45):
and talked to guys who ownbusinesses because a lot of our
clients are our friends too.
And running a business isstressful.
Everything from finances tomaking payroll to basically
feeding the machine, you know,making sure you got more coming
in than going out.
Make sure you're not wastingresources.
Making sure that every dollarcounts.
(43:07):
And I understand that.
And I understand that thetemptation of, well, if I can
just do this on my own, thenthat's less overhead that goes
out.
In marketing, that doesn'twork.
It's fantastical.
It's a myth.
It's fake.
You want to stay away fromthose things.
If you're in business to besuccessful, you need to invest
(43:29):
in your business.
You need to invest in themidterm, the long term.
You need to make sure you getgood people that are working
with you.
And really one of the ways youcan tell if you find that good
person is how much effort andenergy they put into it.
Are they really invested inyour company?
Do they really want to see yousucceed?
(43:50):
Are they really spending timeto understand your business?
Are they running reports?
Or are they giving you kind oflike philosophical marketing
banter where they're talkingabout their thoughts on what
colors would be best?
or generalizations about wherethings should be?
Or is it built on something alittle more substantial than
(44:11):
that?
So that may be one of the bigclues that you have in finding
that right person to help youout.
You're not going to be able toshop by price.
And what I mean by that is youdon't pick the most expensive or
the cheapest person.
I have investigated a lot ofthese large agencies, and there
are many cases where the guy whocharges the most does the least
(44:33):
and actually has the leastamount of resources and
competency.
I mean, where I'm at, just toshow you the games that are
played, even in the awardsspectrum, there is a hospital
near where we are, and everyonelocally knows that this hospital
is not a good hospital to goto.
(44:53):
Everybody knows it.
At least everybody that Italked to.
But what happens is theyrecently received an award for
something like how great theytreat their patients.
And everyone got a lot ofbacklash because everybody knew
that this was basically aconcocted award to try to
(45:16):
counter some of the negativethings that they've done in the
community.
And so the idea is like goingbased upon solely by awards is
also not necessarily a good wayto go about it.
I mean, I won an award in 2009with a $26 million company I was
working with.
And I got the one award, and itwas during the economic
(45:38):
downturn.
And I feel that's a legitimateaward.
It's not something that Ibought or paid for or swayed or
even lobbied for.
It was something given to me bythe CEO of this company.
And so, you know, it's likeit's one of those things, you
know, where the water gets muddyand it's kind of hard to tell
what to trust and what not totrust.
So do your homework.
(45:58):
Hopefully this helps you outand understand that the web is
not everything that you maythink it is and that there are a
lot of games being played onthe web and there are a lot of
different ways to go down thewrong path.
Until we meet again, thank youso much.
And I do hope you enjoyed thisepisode of Over the Bowl.
Introduction (46:17):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to
you by Integris Design, afull-service design and
marketing agency out ofAsheville, North Carolina.
Until next time.
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
Ken (00:10):
The biggest marketing misconceptions on this episode
of Over the Bull.
Welcome back.
In the first episode, we talkedto you about us letting go of a
client.
That's kind of a shockerbecause most people don't want
to talk about these things.
Agencies want you to think thatthey're spotless and everything
goes great.
Everybody gets a five-starexperience and everybody grows.
(00:30):
In reality, that simply doesn'thappen.
You go back and listen to thefirst episode, you're going to
be able to kind of see some ofthe tactics used to steal your
time and your resources andthings you can do to be more
successful on the internet.
Now, with that being said,let's jump right in to common
marketing misconceptions and whythey're wrong.
(00:52):
Now, before we talk about theactual conceptions, let's talk
about Where do they begin?
They usually begin from twoplaces.
Well, maybe three, but we'lltry to cover all those.
Number one are designers thatare largely ignorant of
marketing.
Now, there is something inbusiness called the law of the
(01:13):
lid.
The law of the lid basicallymeans that you only know what
you know, and when you get to acertain point, you cease to be
valuable in giving knowledge inthat particular area.
Now, we all have our laws ofthe lid.
I've got mine.
You've got yours.
Everyone's got theirs.
Now, the question is, is whereis their lid in marketing?
(01:35):
And so someone trying to sellweb design but doesn't know a
lot about search engineoptimization, paid advertising,
or really good squeeze pages,guess what?
They're going to give you atemplate.
They're going to give yougeneric content.
They're going to give youthings that are not capable of
being successful for yourbusiness.
They won't contribute.
The other is lies by omission.
(01:57):
Yes, it's true.
A lot of people do know whatthe reality of the Internet is,
but they also know it's astumbling block to get you to
sign up with them.
And so if they share thereality, it's not as fun as the
fantasy.
And if you come in with afantastical idea of what the
Internet's supposed to do, andyou just got through a bad
experience, then they mayminimize that as well.
(02:20):
Now, you go through that a fewtimes, you spend a lot of money.
And so you want to make surethat you're getting this clear
idea.
And then the last one, the oneI just thought of literally, as
I said, too, in the verybeginning here, and that is the
mythology of the Internet.
All throughout history, peoplehave followed mythologies and
(02:41):
the mythology of the Internet iscompelling.
I mean, let's face it, we allhave ideas of what the Internet
should do.
And we're all told about thesegreat stories of what the
Internet does for other people.
And so it's natural for us tothink that that mythology is
true.
However, the people that makethe mythologies up have a vested
(03:02):
interest in pushing thosemythologies because they want
you to also believe them so thatyou spend more money in those
mythologies.
Now, this could be designers.
This could be marketing people.
This could be the companiesthat actually sell paid
advertising.
The whole thing could be theemperor has no clothes in a lot
of cases.
So are you alone?
(03:23):
Are you the guy that has badluck?
Are you the guy that is missingout on the internet?
Odds are, probably you're notthe only guy in your boat.
Matter of fact, I would arguemost businesses are in your
boat.
because they're falling prey toone or more of these three
ideas that can kill a business.
(03:43):
Now, with that being said,let's jump right into the actual
misconceptions, the actualmythology of what's going on
with the Internet.
So, number one is, if I buildit, they will come.
I can't believe this stillexists on the Internet, and I
can't believe that there aresome companies who are
(04:05):
absolutely blowing up under thismyth.
I mean, some of them advertiseon the Super Bowl, for goodness
sakes.
So what am I talking about?
The idea is if you build awebsite, then people are going
to magically find you.
This means that, you know,you're going to have someone put
together a website.
(04:25):
You're going to post it on theInternet or publish it on the
Internet.
And once it's published on theInternet, then people are just
going to start Googling andfinding you just haphazardly.
Now, this is absolutely nottrue.
When you think of the internet,you think of like this noisy
marketplace where people areyelling and screaming and trying
to sell their goods andservices.
(04:45):
And then imagine that you don'thave a voice or arms or legs
and you're stuck in a corner.
That's a little more like whatit's like if you don't have
marketing.
So when you think of a website,do not think that a website by
itself is going to do what youwant it to do.
Now, let me go a little deeperwith this.
(05:05):
These do-it-yourself websitebuilders, when you talk from
agency to agency, inside, wekind of, you know, we know the
real deal.
And so we kind of laugh atthese ideas.
Now, I know that's kind ofhard, but it's true.
Now, why is that?
Because the first step inbuilding any website is
(05:28):
planning.
a lot of planning.
It's looking at your business,your competitor's business.
It's looking at differentstyles, your demographic, your
audience, and then building awebsite based upon that
criteria.
It's never choose a prettytemplate.
It's never use let AI contentgenerate your pages.
(05:48):
It's never use stockphotography across the board on
your website.
Those things don't work.
Matter of fact, if you startout that way and then you start
working with a marketingcompany, odds are they're going
to dismantle it and have tocompletely rebuild it again
because your designer didn'thave the marketing experience
they need.
If you're doing it yourself,unless you're a marketing
(06:09):
expert, you're definitely notgoing to cover all the bases.
That's the hard reality.
Guys like me, we've spent theyears we have because we know
that there's a lot of thingsthat go into websites.
For example...
Here's a freebie.
The top of your page shouldalways be in motion.
The middle of your page shouldbe more logic.
And the bottom of your pageshould be more reinforcement.
(06:32):
That's just kind of a standardthing most professionals know
today.
The other thing is sitearchitecture and how you build
it, the focus of each page, whatyou name each page, the URL of
each page.
All of that stuff goes into it.
So this leads you to, well, butcan't professionals use
(06:53):
do-it-yourself website builders?
That's like saying, wouldMichelangelo use an eight-pack
box of crayons if he's got hispreferred medium?
Well, of course he would.
So it's the same thing.
So anybody that's claiming tobe a professional but is jumping
into do-it-yourself builders,you should think twice about
(07:14):
that.
Again, this is over the bull.
This is the hard stuff, right?
This is the reality.
And this is why most businessesfail.
You know, they have this ideathat they build a website and
it's just going to work.
Or they throw together a bunchof pages and it's just going to
magically do what they want itto do.
It does not happen like that.
So what's number two?
(07:36):
SEO is a one-time thing.
Now, what's interesting aboutthis is the question itself is
kind of weird.
But the myth is...
We optimized the site lastyear.
We're good, right?
Or we optimized it one time.
Absolutely not.
Now here's the really strangepart of this.
When you build a website,before you actually build the
(07:59):
pages out, before you actuallywork on the structure, you do a
lot of SEO work before you doit.
Even if you're not going to doa full-fledged SEO effort, you
really want to make sure thateverything is in its proper
place.
And so, most people that fail,they'll have a website built
(08:21):
with a bunch of pages, and thosepages are completely structured
in the wrong way.
Google would have a hard timeunderstanding it, as would your
customers, and then it has to berebuilt.
Then if you trust your SEO guyto build it and he doesn't know
design, then you're going tomiss out on all the design
stuff.
So there is this kind of Reesecup, peanut butter, chocolate
(08:43):
thing.
So the idea is SEO, there areparts that are a one-time thing,
which are the initial setup,but it's constantly recurring,
evolving, and changing.
So here's an idea.
One thing that we do is contentmonitoring and updates.
Meaning that there may be anarticle that was posted that was
(09:05):
ranking really well on Googleand driving traffic.
But we look at the qualityscore and it goes down over a
period of time because thecompetition changes and
therefore what you need to do onthat particular page needs to
change too.
So what we do is we regularlyaudit critical pages and then we
monitor where their position ison the web and then we make
(09:29):
changes to those positioning andthat's constant.
It's not a one-time thing.
It's not a write a blog articleand it's magically going to
bring you people forever andever.
There are tools we have wherewe can actually see when
competition edits their contentto what degree they edit their
content.
It's a fight.
I mean, clawing and scratchingto get your way to the top and
(09:51):
then constantly maintaining itto stay at the top.
Now, part of this could be,well, what about title tags?
What about the meta stuff?
You know, you probably heardthese words that sound kind of
scary, you know, title tags andmeta descriptions.
Well, if you really think aboutit, a title tag is simply like
the title of a book and a metadescription is simply the
(10:13):
synopsis of the book.
Every web page you have has gota different title and a
different synopsis.
If they're too close, it couldcause Google to get confused.
And so the idea is maybe thatsynopsis needs to change too.
Maybe that title of the bookisn't as good as it used to be.
And so those things can changetoo.
SEO is a long game and it's anever-changing game.
(10:36):
Even if you did everythingperfect and even if your
competition didn't change, otherpeople didn't post content to
compete, just in the arena ofcontent marketing alone,
Google's algorithms changebecause they're out looking for
the bad guys.
By the way, here's a quick sidenote.
I did publish a press releaseearlier this year about what we
(10:58):
call PBNs, private blognetworks.
Private blog networks could bedetrimental to your business,
and a lot of SEO firms use thesethings.
So if you go tointegrisdesign.com, go to the
About section, you can find ourpress release.
I'll try to put in thefootnotes here too, and you can
actually read what a PBN is.
(11:18):
It's beyond the scope of thismeeting, but you want to be
careful because, again, peoplewho are service providers try to
cut corners as much as they canwhen they can because the more
time they spend on something,the less profitable your project
is.
That's a very key point inevery single thing we're talking
about today.
Now, let's move on.
(11:40):
Social media is free marketing.
Now, the myth is that if youjust post on Facebook or
Instagram, the sales are goingto magically pop up.
Maybe if you get thosefollowers on your page, you're
going to reach those people andyou're going to be able to get
that free marketing push.
So I just did a Google searchjust to find out what AI is
(12:05):
telling me.
I wanted to just see what thecurrent numbers were.
And so what I'm looking at issomewhere between 2% and 6.5% of
people that like your businesspage are going to actually see
your post.
So what does that mean?
You got 100 people, two toroughly seven people are going
to see it.
Now it's according to theinternet I'm looking at right
(12:28):
now.
So the idea that if you gain alot of followers and then you're
going to gain a lot of salesthrough those followers, it's
relative, right?
I mean, what are you reallygoing to sell by doing
absolutely nothing?
So this moves into the idea ofposting, boosting posts, also
running advertisement withinMeta, which is, you know,
(12:48):
obviously Facebook and Instagramand a few other guys.
And there are certainstrategies that work really
good.
Now, the problem is that socialmedia marketing, when you do
advertising and you do itthrough Google, there are
certain things that you dobecause some of the data shows
that over, I think it's around60% of the success of an ad
(13:12):
comes down to the creativity ofit.
And a lot of it comes down tovideo marketing, believe it or
not, creating video ads.
And so, um, if you want alittle side homework, you can
look up the, uh, the ABCDs ofvideo marketing with, uh,
Google.
It's really interesting.
It stands for, uh, attention,branding, connection, and
direction.
(13:32):
Um, Meta also gives you someclues in their 2023, um, manual
on how to do creative, which waspretty good.
I used to minimize howeffective I thought their
suggestions were historically,but the 2023 guide gives some
really good information aboutwhen the brand should pop up and
(13:54):
things.
So we have this combination weuse using both recommendations.
And through trial and error, wefound out what really kind of
works.
But here's the weird thing.
Let me throw this out at you.
We're working with a trailermanufacturer.
And with that trailermanufacturer, one thing we've
run into was meta ads.
(14:17):
And we did these reallypolished looking ads.
And they weren't performingthat well.
So we met with the client andwe talked about what they've
done historically.
And what they did was theyactually did these kind of, not
clumsy, but kind of rudimentarylooking ads that look like
classified ads.
And what we found within theirdemographic was that people are
(14:39):
looking for the best deals.
And so polished ads appeared tobe cuing them into thinking
that their product was moreexpensive.
And so what we're doing iswe're running continual
experiments because it's stillyoung in its project age.
But we're running these ads tofind out maybe if the kind of
rough-looking ads outperform thereally clean-looking ads.
(15:01):
Now, here's the weird thingabout it.
In marketing, we shouldn't carebecause the idea is to bring
people to the website and tomake a purchase.
You're not pay.
You're not get extra pointsbecause of your posturing or how
you do things in terms of likemarketing.
You know, the aesthetics beinga certain standard or whatever.
If poor aesthetics drivepeople, if rough cut videos work
(15:24):
better, then you should do therough cut videos.
And there's a whole segmentthat does this stuff.
So social media marketing isnot only is it not free, but
it's incredibly complicated.
And it requires a lot of trialand error in order to get that
kind of marketing really honedin and working.
So here's the next one.
More traffic equals more sales.
(15:47):
Absolutely not true.
It's never true.
Now, if we insert a word in themiddle of that, it can be true.
And that is more qualifiedtraffic equals more sales.
Now, in SEO, paid advertising,social media marketing, you name
(16:09):
it.
A lot of the game is they showyou the impressions.
You look at the number ofclicks.
You look at these other things.
But it doesn't equal moresales.
And that's because it'sunfocused traffic.
I would rather have a keywordphrase that is incredibly
targeted, that is right where weneed them in order for them to
(16:31):
make a purchase.
I'm going to qualify that in asecond.
Then I went for somethingreally ambiguous and loose.
So the analogy that I wouldgive a potential business is,
let's say we're running akeyword report and they're
selling shoes.
Now, the top keyword isprobably going to be shoes.
(16:51):
But if you can imagine someoneGoogles shoes and they're
looking for high-top basketballshoes.
And they run into shoes.
They're going to see everythingfrom women's shoes, men's
shoes, different styles ofshoes, colors of shoes, whatever
may have you.
So then what they'll do isthey'll refine their search.
The refined search may be bestshoes for basketball.
(17:15):
And then they're going to see abunch of different brands and
reviews and ratings.
Then they're going to dig alittle deeper.
And ultimately, they're goingto be at what we would call the
bottom of the funnel, which isbrand X reviews.
basketball shoes, whatever, youknow, near me or something like
that.
Or maybe they're going to go tosome of the popular buying
(17:35):
platforms like Amazon to lookfor those shoes.
And so the idea is we want tomake sure that we're at the
right place and time and givethe right value proposition and
make sure that we can at leastgive a compelling argument.
And even if we do everythingright, only a certain percentage
are going to buy from us.
So what I meant by moretraffic, more sales, and then I
(17:59):
said, well, rather highlytargeted, and I said, let me
qualify that.
So this is what I mean by that.
In marketing, there are twomain systems that we typically
refer to.
One is the sales funnel.
Now, the sales funnel goesthrough the process of someone
who typically goes fromunderstanding they need
(18:20):
something to making the purchaseto a follow-up.
The ecosystem, which is theother model, says that people
jump in and out of the, youknow, depending upon the model
you look at on the sales funnel,you know, how they transition
from understanding they needsomething to making the
purchase.
They may jump up and downseveral steps rather than making
(18:42):
a logical gradation to making apurchase.
Now what that means is thosekeywords also have to be
targeted.
but they could be higher funnelkeyword targeting.
But then again, if you'retargeting someone, like for
example, one of the steps isresearching options.
You know, you find out you gota problem and then you start to
(19:02):
research the different ways youcan resolve the problem or the
thing you need.
Now, if someone's in theresearching phase, the type of
content you would want to postat that researching phase would
be different than someonewilling to make a purchase.
Because if they're willing tomake a purchase, but you're
addressing them from a highersales funnel standpoint, you may
(19:23):
push them back up the salesfunnel and cost yourself a sale.
So you see it gets a little bitcomplicated, but regardless,
all the funneling from top tobottom and where they're at in
that sales funnel process shouldbe qualified and should be
targeted.
So I want to make sure to letyou know that you just don't
want to target the bottom of thefunnel.
Those are typically moreexpensive.
(19:46):
They typically convert at ahigher rate.
But the higher funnel stuff mayconvert at a lower rate, but
it's also going to be cheaper.
And so if it's cheaper, you mayfind out that it converts at a
lower rate, but it's still morecost effective when you average
out the cost per sale.
So just stuff to think about.
Oh, the next one is very good,in my opinion.
(20:09):
It's Google Ads equals instantsuccess.
Now, the myth is...
you're going to run ads and beprofitable immediately.
Not the case.
It's absolutely not, especiallytoday, it's not the case.
Because now you have thingslike Google's artificial
intelligence, looking at howpeople use the internet, things
(20:32):
like that, where they're at inthe buying cycle, which ones
convert better based upon wherethat person's at in their buying
cycle and what they're doing.
And there's tons and tons offactors that go into it.
So now it does happen.
I'm not going to lie to you.
Sometimes, if it's a verysimple model, you may see
success early out.
Now, when I say simple, simpleis relative.
(20:55):
And so I've seen very simpleofferings that have a lot of
competition also require a lotof work.
Because it goes far and beyondjust running ads, putting a
bunch of text up, and publishingthem on the internet and
showing up on Google.
Remember, that's just the firststep.
They also are going to look atyour price value, should they
(21:16):
use you.
And the old adage is where ifyou can't distinguish yourself
from anybody else, they're goingto default to price.
And there's always going to besomebody willing to charge a
little bit less and go out ofbusiness a little bit quicker if
you leave it to that.
And so the idea is Google Ads,you're looking somewhere
typically between four or sixweeks or maybe longer.
(21:37):
which means you have to invest.
And the more you invest in it,the quicker you can learn.
And also the more differentcategories in which you
advertise in, those will alsorequire different budgets.
And so you want to be carefulabout someone that tells you
they're going to turn on ads andthen you're going to see this
magic.
Or if you bought into themythology that once you run ads,
(22:00):
it's going to magically happen.
Not the case.
You need an expert that's goingto go do it.
And here's a little side note.
When it comes to Google Ads,you can actually set them up
yourself.
But it's kind of like doing thedo-it-yourself website builder.
It's not going to work well.
When I've gone throughdifferent Google Ads training
and learning and everything, thedegree at which you set up a
(22:23):
campaign that's successful...
and you learn from requires alot of work and a lot of
expertise.
And so, yeah, you can do ityourself, but when you do, it's
probably not going to work asgood as if you have an expert
doing it for you.
That's just the way it is.
That's why we work hard to getour Google Ads partnership.
(22:43):
You've got to maintain acertain standard to keep that
partnership with Google.
And we do that because webelieve that it shows that we do
put the extra effort into ourGoogle Ads effort.
So here's the next one.
Email marketing is dead.
It doesn't work.
Now the myth is that no onereads them.
(23:04):
No one uses them.
Now the reality is emailmarketing could be the most
powerful tool for your business.
Now Obviously, puttingsomething on your website like
sign up for our newsletter isnot going to do the trick.
Now, what you want to do is youwant to make a compelling
reason for someone to sign upand share their email address.
(23:27):
Because in today's world,sharing an email is like sharing
money.
You don't want to do it thatoften and you're probably not
going to give your best emailaddress in some cases.
So what you want to do is youwant to make sure that what
you're offering is somethingthat somebody would want.
Now, the other side is you wantto make sure to build the right
processes in email marketing.
(23:49):
For example, the length of theemails, the call to action you
put in your emails, thefrequency of your emails,
automations.
You can automatically send outemails on a certain schedule.
And the idea is that you dowant to engage with people who
are interested in your product.
(24:09):
So there's another thing aboutemail marketing that's really
interesting.
Remember earlier we weretalking about the whole sales
funnel thing.
And we also talked about peoplewon't necessarily choose your
product even if you've doneeverything right.
Because people are people.
They can make bad choices.
They can decide to do somethingcompletely different just
(24:30):
because they happen to likesomething.
Now, but here's kind of thething.
When they come to your website,if you can make that email
offer something reallycompelling, then you do
something that normally youwouldn't do.
And that is capture a certainnumber of people's email
addresses that would havenormally left your website.
(24:50):
Then what you could do is youcould start marketing to them
through your business and thenmaybe capture some of those
people that weren't.
Now, we ran this test recentlyagain.
Now, we run a lot of these, butthis is just the most recent
one, was we have a client thathas a seasonal business.
Now, in their seasonalbusiness, it normally picks up,
(25:13):
you know, in the spring.
So we ran a very special offer,basically saying, are you
getting ready for the spring?
If so, share this, and whenyou're ready to make the
purchase or ready to moveforward, we'll We'll share this
out.
Now, I'm doing this very sloppybecause I don't want to give
away all the stuff we workedthrough with them.
But then what happened was westarted getting a lot of people
(25:36):
signing up.
And that's exactly what washappening.
They were looking, but theyweren't ready to make the
purchase.
And we captured a lot of emailaddresses of people who were in
that preparation phase.
Now, if they would have leftthe website...
then a large portion of themare never going to remember they
visited that website to beginwith.
But now we have the ability toreach out and make special
(25:59):
offers and understand them alittle bit better.
So email marketing is not deadby any stretch of the
imagination.
Now let's piggyback a littlebit on last week.
This does not mean you goacross the internet and you
start looking for emailaddresses and start sending
emails from like your...
regular email address, or eventhrough, you know, one of the
(26:23):
email services that are outthere, you know, like Constant
Contact, Active Campaign,MailChimp.
There's a bunch of other onesout there because those are not
for cold email marketing.
And that's what that's called.
You do not want to use them forthat.
Basically, what you want to dois you want to market.
You want to capture those emailaddresses legitimately, and
then you want to engage withthem.
(26:44):
I mean, do you really want yourbusiness to be associated as
the people that send out coldemails?
More than likely, you don't.
For me, like I told you lastweek, I block them.
I don't care what the offer is.
I don't care how much theypromise.
I don't care what they'll do.
I block them because they didnot respect my time.
(27:04):
You don't want to be on theother end of that.
And don't fall prey to it.
And then plus, if you send outbulk emails from your email, you
can actually get your emailwhere it's blocked on some of
the servers.
So be careful about that.
Oh, and now we're at one thathits home.
This one hit home actually acouple weeks ago.
And the idea is more quantityis better.
(27:27):
You know, the idea is crank outa lot of blog posts.
Now, what a lot of people aredoing are using artificial
intelligence to create theseposts.
Now, this is a horrible,absolutely horrible idea.
The idea is quality trumpsquantity.
And we have tools that can helpus understand effective, you
(27:51):
know, popular blog articles.
And then we can kind of gleanwhat's good from all those using
artificial intelligence andsome other tools.
We can build an outline.
We can determine the length ofthe article and also how many
times you should use certainwords and how many times you
should not use certain words.
And to modify and create thosearticles takes a lot of time to
(28:14):
do that kind of stuff.
And so it requires specialtools, special knowledge, things
like that.
Nothing crazy, but it's justsomething that an average
business doesn't want to taketime to learn.
But the idea that if you'regoing to think you're going to
just put up a bunch of AIcontent and publish it on a
(28:35):
website is probably one of theworst ideas you could possibly
do.
We had a client who...
wasn't sold on the idea that weshould focus on creating really
effective, optimized articlesand felt it was more important
to crank out a quantity ofarticles.
Now, when we met, I looked atthe articles and it was obvious
(29:00):
that they were all generated byChatGPT.
Now, ChatGPT can be a reallycool tool and we use it in a lot
of places.
Now, not in that case.
So the articles are basicallypublished or scheduled to be
published on her website usingthem.
And I can't quite talk her offthe ledge.
(29:20):
Like in her mind, it's just asthough quantity is going to
trump it.
And if we're not doing enoughin terms of quantity, then it's
not effective.
Now, this is absolutely untrue.
Proper, well-sought out,well-searched articles can be
very beneficial.
Now I'm going to give you anexample, not a promise, but just
(29:43):
an example of how effective itcan be.
Using some of the tools wehave, we're able to see what
competitors are publishing ontheir website that's bringing
them the most traffic.
Then what we can do is takethat article and then we can
reconstruct it but make it a lotbetter than we've had it.
(30:03):
Or they have it.
Then once we published thatarticle on the first index, no
joke, first time Google saw thatarticle, we were on the top
page.
Now, that's because we did alot of work on the front end of
this.
We did not just simply say,hey, create me an article with
this keyword phrase on it orcreate me this and then send
(30:27):
that as though it's uniquecontent.
Now, the sad truth is that Ihave seen some service providers
who are guaranteeing customcontent, and they're giving
unlimited revisions on thatcontent, and then they publish
it.
Now, think of it in terms of amodel.
(30:49):
If you own that business, wouldyou be able to give unlimited
revisions to content unless youwere using something like
artificial intelligence?
The answer is no.
I mean, the next worst casescenarios are using somebody
that's not familiar with yournative language.
And that's also going to bejust as bad.
Creating good content takes awhile.
(31:11):
I mean, you can spend an hour,two hours, maybe even longer
properly weighting, fine tuningand humanizing content based on
the best of outlines.
And so do not buy into this.
Do not do it.
You want quality over quantity.
And don't get fooled into thisAI content stuff.
There's too many people outthere trying to peddle it
(31:33):
because it's an easy bug.
Now, I'm going to retouch onsomething because this is huge.
And the idea that marketingshould bring instant results.
Absolutely, this is not true.
Marketing is a continualeffort.
And some of it's a long game.
Some of it's a midterm game.
(31:54):
And sometimes you just step upto the plate and you knock it
out of the ballpark and it justworks.
So this story goes back, gosh,probably three years.
We had a new guy come in.
He had a, you know, a starterbudget.
And when we first ran thecampaign, he made an
astronomical amount of sales offour first effort.
(32:17):
And we spent a lot of timeworking with him, trying to talk
him off the ledge of thinkingthat would always be his
results.
The reality is sometimes thoseearly success stories can be
hard because that sets a toneand that tone is unrealistic.
The reality is, is you need amidterm and a long-term gain.
(32:37):
And if you get some short-termsuccesses, then great.
That's just a little bitbetter.
But you don't ever want to bethe person who's in a position
where you've got a very limitedbudget, a finite amount of time,
and you're counting on thatHail Mary pass to somehow save
your business.
If you're looking for that andyou're trying to find someone to
(32:58):
be able to do that, keep inmind the odds are staggering
against you.
It really takes effort.
time, energy, a lot ofcreativity, and a lot of
massaging campaigns in order toget them effective.
Search engine optimizationstrategies are definitely the
long game.
I mean, you should look at atleast six months or more for
(33:20):
those.
Again, sometimes you may hitthe algorithm just right and you
may show up a little bitquicker than that, but we would
never sell it under thatpretense.
And we also sell it under theterms of gaining visibility and
not something ridiculous likebeing number one on Google for a
certain keyword phrase.
That kind of stuff is justsensationalism.
Now, here's the other thing.
(33:43):
Have you ever heard that yourcustomers don't use something
like LinkedIn or maybe Facebookor Instagram?
Now, here's the thing.
It's just like payments.
Some people like to pay withcredit cards, some cash, some
checks, some Venmo, some PayPal,some whatever, some bank
(34:04):
transactions, however they wantto do it.
It's kind of the same thingwith the way you market on the
Internet.
I've heard a lot of people saythat their people are not on
Facebook no more.
Probably more Instagram.
But it's like this concept thatthere's a certain demographic
in certain places where Andwhile that is true to a certain
extent, but to assume that theirclients don't reside in those
(34:28):
places is often a mistake.
And so the idea is kind oftwofold, because it's a
challenge.
Because the first challenge isyou really want to be everywhere
your clients are, and you wantto be able to measure how
successful each one of thoseplatforms are.
But the other side is, is Ifyou're a small business, you're
(34:50):
not going to be able to properlyinvest in all those efforts.
And so what you want to be ableto do is strategically choose
where you want to be on theInternet.
But really, that should comeoff a lot of professional
guidance.
And you should never just tryto be everywhere all the time
and definitely don't just thinkspinning up a business page on a
(35:12):
certain profile like X orFacebook is going to do anything
significant for your business,maybe even insignificant for
your business.
Matter of fact, if you don'ttake it seriously, people who
live on those platforms or spenda lot of time on them, they
won't see that you're seriousabout it and they may not even
trust your business because youdon't have the proper presence
(35:32):
on those platforms to beginwith.
So it's really important torealize that, yeah, your
customers may be there, but youneed to put a serious effort
where you're going to put thateffort and understand if you're
just trying to get a place, aspace holder on a certain
platform like X or Twitter,which is Twitter, Facebook or
(35:53):
whatever, then understand whereyou're at with those platforms
and understand what you'retrying to achieve.
Okay, it's time to break a lotof hearts with the last one.
And that is you can do ityourself for everything for your
business when it comes tomarketing and design.
You know what I'm talkingabout.
(36:13):
Those design programs out therethat's got all those templates.
Those website builders with allthose themes.
The start marketing in minutes.
Build your own Facebook page.
Boost your own post.
I get it.
I get it.
You're trying to avoid theexpertise of someone who lives
(36:35):
it.
Now, I will tell you that froman agency perspective, and
talking to literally I don'tknow how many businesses since
2006, I have yet to run across abusiness that has come to us
and has said theirdo-it-yourself effort worked.
(36:58):
I've not run into that yet.
Now, they may have had somesuccesses, but they're not good
successes, and they're notcumulative successes.
What I mean by that is they'renot building and getting
stronger.
They hold on tighter to thelittle bit of things that
they're doing that works,unknowingly not knowing what's
(37:21):
not working.
I know that's a weird thing tosay, but basically they just
don't know what they should get.
And so the temptation...
is that in the commercials forsome of the stuff is just so
clever.
They'll have somebody on therethat you look at and you go, I'm
probably smarter than thatperson, and if they can do it, I
(37:42):
can do it.
Now, that's why they have thosepeople on the do-it-yourself
ads and commercials.
They want you to believe thatthat person was able to do it,
and they're crazy successful,And they want you to think that
a large part or a portion oftheir success is because of the
things they did themselves usingthat stuff.
This is probably the hardestmyth to try to convey to
(38:07):
someone.
Now, here's why.
Because they see us as having adog in the fight.
Meaning that if I'm talking tosomeone one-on-one and I say,
you don't want to usedo-it-yourselfers.
they're probably thinking intheir mind, well, this is an
agency that don't want us to.
They want us to spend moneywith them.
(38:29):
Now, the reality is, is thatI've seen it.
I've seen everyone that comesin and out of this office, in
Zooms, on phone consultations,on everything.
I've seen it.
And the reality is, is no onehas come across my desk that has
ever had great success withthese programs.
(38:49):
It's something cheap.
So I'll leave you with this.
If you have the choice ofbuying something cheap, but that
cheap thing would not get youwhat you're trying to achieve,
would you ever buy the cheapthing to begin with?
Obviously, the answer is no.
No one would do that.
I mean, why would they dosomething like that?
(39:10):
And so the idea are thesebuilders are cleverly built
where they make you think thatyou can accomplish something
that professionals have spent along time trying to perfect.
I mean, going back and, youknow, again, I mentioned Edward
Bernays in the last episode.
You look at some of thedifferent tactics and strategies
and then just knowing theamount of time and effort and
(39:33):
energy you have to brainstormand change things and alter them
in order to make themeffective.
It's just not there.
And don't buy into this AIthing.
Now, granted, AI is doing somePretty incredible things.
Matter of fact, some amazingthings.
But it's not simplifying theprocesses.
(39:55):
It's actually adding a lot ofcomplexity and requires a lot
more expertise in order toharness the power of artificial
intelligence in a meaningfulway.
So just using AI for verysimplistic thoughts is not going
to work.
And ultimately, let's say itdoes work.
It's kind of like that if, asof this point, now I don't know
(40:18):
what's going to happen in thenext year or two, everything's
growing exponentially.
But if you look at it likethis, let's assume that you want
a million dollars and youharness that million dollars and
you're able to do what you wantto.
Now imagine everybody on theplanet gets a million dollars.
How valuable is a milliondollars?
(40:39):
Well, everybody's essentiallyat zero point, right?
So, It's a million dollarsmeans nothing, but a million
dollars in one means a littlesomething, and then a million
dollars in two, and et cetera,et cetera, all the way up.
And so it's kind of the samething with artificial
intelligence.
As we're seeing it develop,we're seeing that it can be used
(41:01):
in a broad swath of differentways, some bad, some good.
But ultimately, even if itworked perfect for everybody,
there's got to be something thatmakes it unique Otherwise,
everybody's just at the samelevel they were to begin with,
just a much more sophisticatedstarting point.
Now, I could be wrong, butthat's kind of the way I'm
(41:21):
seeing it as of today.
So, what are our takeaways?
Obviously, the big takeaway isdon't use do-it-yourself
builders.
Look, you're listening to apodcast.
I don't know you.
You probably never will reachout to us.
I have nothing to gain bytelling you not to use
do-it-yourself website builders.
other than giving you aneffective resource in this
(41:44):
podcast.
The internet is a modern-daymythology.
It's propped up by powerfulcompanies that are offering
services, big tech companies,whatever, do-it-yourself
builders, and even people whoprovide services that want to
(42:04):
prop up the mythology of theinternet in order to sell what
they're trying to sell to you.
Now, the reality is theinternet is a powerful tool, an
incredibly powerful tool, ifit's harnessed in the right way
with the right expectations.
(42:25):
If you miss the mark on that,you're going to be disappointed,
frustrated, aggravated, and youmay go out of business trying
to chase something that trulydoes not exist.
So to be successful, and I knowwhat you're doing.
I mean, business owners, man, Ican tell you, I've sat around
(42:45):
and talked to guys who ownbusinesses because a lot of our
clients are our friends too.
And running a business isstressful.
Everything from finances tomaking payroll to basically
feeding the machine, you know,making sure you got more coming
in than going out.
Make sure you're not wastingresources.
Making sure that every dollarcounts.
(43:07):
And I understand that.
And I understand that thetemptation of, well, if I can
just do this on my own, thenthat's less overhead that goes
out.
In marketing, that doesn'twork.
It's fantastical.
It's a myth.
It's fake.
You want to stay away fromthose things.
If you're in business to besuccessful, you need to invest
(43:29):
in your business.
You need to invest in themidterm, the long term.
You need to make sure you getgood people that are working
with you.
And really one of the ways youcan tell if you find that good
person is how much effort andenergy they put into it.
Are they really invested inyour company?
Do they really want to see yousucceed?
(43:50):
Are they really spending timeto understand your business?
Are they running reports?
Or are they giving you kind oflike philosophical marketing
banter where they're talkingabout their thoughts on what
colors would be best?
or generalizations about wherethings should be?
Or is it built on something alittle more substantial than
(44:11):
that?
So that may be one of the bigclues that you have in finding
that right person to help youout.
You're not going to be able toshop by price.
And what I mean by that is youdon't pick the most expensive or
the cheapest person.
I have investigated a lot ofthese large agencies, and there
are many cases where the guy whocharges the most does the least
(44:33):
and actually has the leastamount of resources and
competency.
I mean, where I'm at, just toshow you the games that are
played, even in the awardsspectrum, there is a hospital
near where we are, and everyonelocally knows that this hospital
is not a good hospital to goto.
(44:53):
Everybody knows it.
At least everybody that Italked to.
But what happens is theyrecently received an award for
something like how great theytreat their patients.
And everyone got a lot ofbacklash because everybody knew
that this was basically aconcocted award to try to
(45:16):
counter some of the negativethings that they've done in the
community.
And so the idea is like goingbased upon solely by awards is
also not necessarily a good wayto go about it.
I mean, I won an award in 2009with a $26 million company I was
working with.
And I got the one award, and itwas during the economic
(45:38):
downturn.
And I feel that's a legitimateaward.
It's not something that Ibought or paid for or swayed or
even lobbied for.
It was something given to me bythe CEO of this company.
And so, you know, it's likeit's one of those things, you
know, where the water gets muddyand it's kind of hard to tell
what to trust and what not totrust.
So do your homework.
(45:58):
Hopefully this helps you outand understand that the web is
not everything that you maythink it is and that there are a
lot of games being played onthe web and there are a lot of
different ways to go down thewrong path.
Until we meet again, thank youso much.
And I do hope you enjoyed thisepisode of Over the Bowl.
Introduction (46:17):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to
you by Integris Design, afull-service design and
marketing agency out ofAsheville, North Carolina.
Until next time.
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