May 6, 2025 • 47 mins
Episode Summary for The Advisory Board Podcast
Sponsored by ClientTether
In this episode of The Advisory Board Podcast, host Dave sits down with a true heavyweight in franchise marketing: Lonnie Jones, founder and CEO of Local SEO Help. Lonnie’s been deep in the SEO trenches for years, helping franchise brands (including powerhouses like Horsepower Brands) dominate digital real estate in competitive verticals. But make no mistake—this conversation isn’t just for SEO nerds. It’s a masterclass on how to build long-term marketing momentum using a “stacked” approach.A huge shoutout to our sponsor ClientTether, the CRM that helps franchise brands and owners convert leads with surgical precision. Thanks for powering this episode!👊 Highlights You Can’t Miss:
Sponsored by ClientTether
In this episode of The Advisory Board Podcast, host Dave sits down with a true heavyweight in franchise marketing: Lonnie Jones, founder and CEO of Local SEO Help. Lonnie’s been deep in the SEO trenches for years, helping franchise brands (including powerhouses like Horsepower Brands) dominate digital real estate in competitive verticals. But make no mistake—this conversation isn’t just for SEO nerds. It’s a masterclass on how to build long-term marketing momentum using a “stacked” approach.A huge shoutout to our sponsor ClientTether, the CRM that helps franchise brands and owners convert leads with surgical precision. Thanks for powering this episode!👊 Highlights You Can’t Miss:
- From Accounting to Algorithms: Lonnie’s unlikely journey from government cubicle to SEO kingpin started with a finance degree and a side hustle. Today, he helps franchisees and franchisors alike build sustainable digital visibility.
- Why “Stacking” Works: Lonnie introduces the concept of “stacked marketing,” a layered, multi-touch strategy designed to build influence over time. Spoiler: if you're throwing up a Facebook ad and expecting instant leads, you’re doing it wrong.
- The Patience Problem: Franchisees often expect overnight success from campaigns. Lonnie challenges that thinking and explains why consistent visibility and brand impressions across channels (online and offline) create conversion magic.
- SEO in the Age of AI: The search game is changing—fast. With tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI search stealing the spotlight, traditional keyword-stuffing just won’t cut it. Lonnie breaks down what this shift means and how to future-proof your SEO strategy.
- Omnichannel ≠ Everywhere: You don’t need to be on every platform. But you do need to be smart. Lonnie shares how to blend digital ads, local presence, reviews, and retargeting to create brand resonance without blowing your budget.
- Vet Before You Bet: One of Lonnie’s golden rules? Validate your marketing partners. Whether you’re a franchisor or a franchisee, don’t just throw money at shiny campaigns—talk to peers, review actual results, and give strategies time to mature.
- Functional Experts Win: Don’t look for one agency to do it all. SEO, Google Ads, Meta, and CRM strategy each require dedicated, deep expertise. Lonnie practices what he preaches by focusing solely on SEO—and being the absolute best at it.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All right, guys, Hey, I've got another great episode of
the Advisory Board podcast here, And as you know, we
bring in experts from the franchise community to help coach
you on specific elements, strategies, tactics, things you can do
that will help you build a franchise brand that will last.
Now I've got with me today, I've got Lonnie Jones.
If you don't know Lonnie Jones, you probably need to
and you're gonna get to know him a little bit
(00:22):
better today. But he's been in franchise marketing for years
and he is the co founder. While he's the founder
and the CEO of Local SEO Help, He's done a
ton of work with a lot of big brands. Guys.
You know, if you've ever heard of a little platform
company called Horsepower Brands, I guess you know he's worked
with them, works with a ton of home service brands,
(00:43):
people that specialize in like he specializes in competitive categories
and for SEO. If you don't know what that means,
it means he's got Cojon's Because most people will just
take your money and like screw it up or just
do a mediocre job. But he actually helps people crush
SEO get people in top five in their categories. But
he's he's got a ton of a ton of accolades.
He's built the what is it called the Franchise SEO
(01:05):
Masterclasses on franchisors dot com. So really knows this stuff.
Likes to give back to the community. And as we
were talking, I was like, oh, man, like, we got
to get you on the on the podcast. We can
get you to share some of your insights with all
these folks who are trying to dial in se oh
a lot of other categories of digital marketing. I haven't
been working for people. This is tried and trude and
it's a long term asset. Really. But before I dive
(01:27):
in to the topic, uh, you got to know that
he loves he loves bourbon dogs and growing heirloom tomatoes
that one off guard and uh yeah, lives up in
northern Idaho up on a beautiful lake. If you ever
heard of quart A Lane. He moved there after the
skin has moved out, so don't worry about that. And
uh but but really, brilliant guy. Now, Lonnie, I've bragged
(01:49):
on you a little tell us a little bit more
about you. Tell us about local SEO help, and then
let's jump into our topic, which is how do you
create a stacked marketing approach and franchising go for it?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Man? All right, well, thanks for having me on here.
I appreciate you spending the time to ask me some
questions and chit chat about franchise marketing and whatever else
we end up talking about today. I guess if I
were to go back into my background that led me
to this point today, I don't consider myself a marketer
because I didn't start my path down this road as
(02:18):
a marketer. I was an entrepreneur. So I relate very
heavily to all the franchise brand founders out there, all
the franchise e's out there. Everybody has that entrepreneur mindset,
all trying to leverage that and grow and build an
empire or whatever it is that they're trying to develop
in order to build their dream. It all starts with
having a mindset of being an entrepreneur. And that's just
(02:40):
kind of where I always looked at myself. In college,
I had a finance degree, so I was a numbers guy.
I was analyzing the stock market. I was doing things
like that, which you know a lot of people still
do to this day. But that's kind of where my
mind started. Won some business plan competition, so I don't know,
I just really had that itch. Graduated, got a cubical
(03:01):
job for the government, quickly learned that's not for me.
And I think a lot of the people that are
going to watch this can relate to that, especially in
their franchise space. It only I'm the only person you'll
meet that quit a government job. I mean, I'm the
only idiot that would actually do something like that. But
before I quit it, guess what, I started a business
and so but at that point I had a finance
(03:23):
degree an accounting background. So I started a little accounting
firm and was picked up clients all over southern California
area at that point and was supporting them in their accounting.
I had teams helping me, and that's where I started.
Just it was the itch. It wasn't the accounting piece,
it wasn't the finance piece. It was just that was
my mechanism. I really just wanted to start a business somehow.
(03:46):
That led me to working with one of my clients
at the time was in a marketing agency and I
was doing, you know, the accounting for them. And I said, hey,
this is interesting, and I got to know them very well.
And just since I'm always thinking a business ideas, I said,
and the Internet at that point, you know, I'm old.
I'm forty five, so the Internet was fairly new then.
I was like, I want to start an Internet company.
(04:06):
You know what a brilliant idea that everybody on this
planet seems to have, and pitched it to my marketing
agency client at the time. I said, I have this
business idea. You helped me with it. They said, yeah,
we'll be partners, gave me a budget, we built it,
grew that very successfully. Now that's how I learned all
this Internet stuff. I was an accountant and I was
(04:28):
selling products on e commerce e commerce website, and I
literally picked a book up called The Art of SEO,
which is an old book. They still have versions of
it to this day, very known in the SEO space.
And that's why I learned that CEO. I have a book,
believe it or not, and just started applying what I
was reading and I started getting more interested in it
and stuff started working, and I was like, well, maybe
(04:48):
I know something you know, And so ended up ranking
number one for a lot of super competitive keywords in
the industry I was in, and I was like, well,
maybe I know something. So anyway, that business ended up
getting sold to a publicly traded company, and I was like,
what am I gonna do with my life? You know
this entrepreneur mindset. I've grown a successful business. What do
I do now? Well, guess what happened. Everybody in my
(05:10):
industry called me up and said, Lona, you heard what happened.
You know, can you help us with SEO? I'm like,
what are you talking about? Help you with SEO? That's
what I guess. I was known as the guy who
ranked number one. That was their takeaway from me. In
my mind, I was a business owner and I was
just like learning how to do this thing to help me. So,
you know the way I started with that, I'm not
the person out there trying to sell you marketing services
(05:32):
for the sake of selling marketing services, Like I totally
understand that this stuff needs to work, it needs to
be efficient. You're thinking about your budgets, and so I
think because I've been that way and my desire to
go deep into things and really learn something, it just
kept carrying on over the years and more referrals would
come my way. I never did marketing, really, I've never
(05:53):
been on podcasts and things like this. Over All the
early years of my career, just kept getting referrals and
growing to an agency, to the point where I didn't
even know I was an agency. It was just me
and some people helping me, and we were helping businesses
and getting having success, and we just kept getting more.
And then like one day, I'm you know, in my
community of digital marketers and SEO guys, and they're all
(06:15):
comparing notes on their agencies, and I'm like, wait a minute,
I'm way bigger when it comes to an agency. I
have way more clients than all you guys, like, and
I didn't even think of myself as an agency. I
guess I should start thinking that way. So anyway, that's
kind of how I became an agency. And then in
the midst of that, you know, referrals come my way.
I got handed over a very aggressive franchise group of
(06:39):
owners that owned a bunch of franchise locations, and they said, hey, Lona,
we know for good things about you. We work for
franchisees under X, Y and Z brain. I don't want
to name names, and we're not doing very well. We
want to get somebody outside to come in and help us.
And I said, all right, well, let me give it
a shot. Had a lot of success with them, and
that's how I started enfranchising. And because I had sex
(06:59):
with six that's with them, they were big known people
in the industry. They would then, you know, roll up
to the franchise brands that they were under and say, hey,
you need to talk to Lonnie. You need to talk
to Lonnie. And so that led me to working with
brands because they would listen to me and go, you know,
I'm sure they were annoyed, right, You know how brands
are the franchisees are all poking and prodding at them,
(07:20):
and now they bring this a marketing guy. They've never
heard of it. So and I'm a pretty loudmouth guy,
so I have no problem you know, speaking what I
think and speaking what I know. And so eventually I
broke through started helping brands. And I just gave you
the very long winded answer of how I got into
the franchise space and where I am today. Now we
work with many brands in the in the you know,
(07:41):
a lot of them are highly successful, a lot of
growth rates and that are the leaders in the space.
So anyway, that's the beginning and the end of my
process how I got here today. Dave, thank you, No,
I appreciate it. And you guys, it's gonna be a
three and a half hour podcast today.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Just want to get warnings that because that's the first
thirty seven questions. Kidding Lonnie's great, guys. I want to
I want to clarify. Somebody said with that group of
original owners, he didn't have sex with them, he had
ask with them. So I just want to make sure
you know that's not part of the program.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
See, Dave, I thought you just auld edit that out.
I was trying to like not adjust that. Now here
you are bringing it.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
We're leading into it.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Brother, Yeah, please clarify, I did not I did not
go down that path.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
No, that was not the path. This is only se O.
Those are the only three like that for clearing that. Yeah,
you're welcome. So, uh, let's talk about stacked. So so
when the reason why we want to get together is
because you were talking when we were we were brainstorming
about some things. Uh, a potential mutual client, and you
start talking about this concept of creating a stacked marketing approach,
(08:47):
and I was like, like you were saying words like yes, yes, yes,
like I see it and I believe it, and we
should we should build this out together as content. So
maybe what you could do is like tell us a
little bit how what a stacking mean to you or
what is a stack influence process? Like how do stacked
marketing work? And then we'll kind of break it apart
together and dig into that.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, tell you where it came from. I mean a
lot of there's a lot of misconceptions out there with
franchise e'se. I mean, franchise's. What they want to do
is they want to start their business and they want
to go out there and do marketing, marketing and generate
business sales, leads, whatever it may be. And there's this
misconception that they can just go set up Facebook ads,
(09:28):
you know, they can do it themselves even and throw
an ad out there and the leads are just gonna
people are going to see that ad and they're just
going to be dying for that product or service. I'm
here to tell you that's never gonna happen. Okay, that's
never going to happen. And it barely could happen if
somebody's really good at Facebook ads or Google ads or
SEO or you know, even offline things like print and
(09:51):
ed d M, and there's just lots of ways you
can market. But people think that there's a direct response
in every every advertisement or every marketing channel out there,
and it's just never ever in the history of marketing
as that happened, in my opinion. I mean, I'm sure
there's there's there's there's a scenario where that's happened, but
as a whole, it doesn't happen that way. But that's
what people think. They I'm gonna do an ad and
(10:12):
the leads are gonna pour. It never happens. And so
you know, I work with a lot of existing franchisees,
So I would get into a new franchise brand and
they would hand me the keys to the kingdom. And
I have franchisees from the full spectrum. Some have been
around for five years, six years, seven years, and some
of them that are just launching today. Now I would
apply the same marketing to both groups of people, and
(10:34):
I would learn that the people have been in business
for six or seven years. The conversion rate is sky
high compared to the people that are coming out of
the gate from scratch. I'm like, wow, it's the same marketing,
it's the same.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Strategy of franchises, right, Like the majority of them aren't old, like,
the majority of them are new form, growing, grow and grow. Right. So, yeah,
it's a bit of a problem. Sorry to cut you out.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So no, it's great, I mean I and so like
you start thinking about what is it that's making that happen. Well,
the one thing is the franchisees have been around for years.
They've had a chance to be out there and influence people.
Over all those years, there's been different marketing channels. They
see their trucks driving around town, they see the yard
signs in front of job sites for home service businesses
(11:18):
or similar things like. That's where people in their local
markets are getting some type of exposure to them or influence.
And when they then are doing a Facebook ad out
there and that those saying people end up seeing that ad,
then they're more likely to pull the trigger, right, And
so I don't know, I just hate the idea that
(11:41):
the expectation with franchise ease and even in some cases
the brand's marketing teams even still are having This interpretation
is we're going to do an advertising campaign this and
generate generate business and that's it. So and I've seen
so many franchisees struggle. They're going through different marketing agencies.
They think that's how it's supposed to be. It's never
(12:01):
going to be that way. But if I was a
CMO for a brand, what I would what I would
do is I would consider all the areas that a
consumer would potentially be interact with my brand, right and
so that could be offline the same thing I mentioned
trucks driving by. It could be yard signs, things like that.
(12:22):
They're going to see that. That's going to create some
level of impression influence. They're going to see a Facebook ad,
They're going to go to a home show and see them.
Then they might when the timing is right, when they're
ready to go, pull the trigger. They go to Google.
They type in you know roofing, I need a roofing replacement.
And now they go and Google pops up twenty businesses,
(12:43):
ten businesses, three businesses. Guess which one they're going to
gravitate towards the one that they've seen. But I mean,
but people still think that you can do a Google
ad campaign or a Facebook head campaign and someone's going
to click on that ad and go pull the trigger.
It's just not going to happen. And so when I
when I when I, you know. So the concept of
(13:03):
the stacking influence is more around the idea that it's
a strategy. You know, it's not just a direct response
or AD lead AD lead. Less than one percent of
the people that are going to see AD are going
to pull the trigger. You've spent money to be seen
by one hundred percent of them. What are you going
to do with the other ninety nine percent? You know?
And So anyway, that's kind of where this concept originated from,
(13:24):
and just trying to get a little bit of you know,
discussion out there so franchisees can really have the right
expectations and think differently about how they might approach their
local marketing.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, when they let's dial it in for a second
round SEO, right, because I think for a while, SEO
became a lot less sexy, Like, hey, Facebook and meta
ads came out and everyone wanted to spend money on
Google ads and blah blah blah. Right, if there's a
new channel, we should get on Vine? Oh we should
get on TikTok Wait it's going to way wait it's back. Okay,
Like everyone's thinking about all the new channels so much,
(13:56):
and they're so hot and interesting that they're like that
that crazy appetitzes that shows upon the menu once and
never shows up again. Right, Sometimes these marketing channels are
kind of like that. One of the things that's really
critical about se and I want to give you a
chance to rip on this, but I want to que
it up for you, is the SEO landscape is changing
yet again, right and it's and it's changing the way.
(14:18):
That's interesting because how many people are now using Perplexity
or open AI as their search engines and not Google.
And these search these AI engines are not searching Google
ads for keywords. They are only searching SEO and they're
optimizing answers that are coming from web pages that have
excellent SEO that can be used to repurpose and easily
(14:39):
serve up the content back to their consumer. So can
you maybe share just for a second, like some of
the things that are shifting around that consumer search behavior
and how that makes SEO even more important to double
down on right now?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Oh now, I love that topic of me. I actually
been asked that some similar version of that quite often,
because people are thinking, well, are you afraid SEO going
to die? I'm like, I say, it was not dying.
It's just shifting. It's already shifted one hundred times in
all the years I've been doing this, and it's just
gonna It's gonna shift a hundred times more before I
retire one day. But right now it's definitely shifting into
(15:12):
the AI platforms. And I love that. You understand that,
I mean, you understand that those are also search engines.
You know what. I use chat shipt all the damn time,
and and you know why, Because I ask it a question,
I can give it context. You know my questions. You
can tell I talk a lot, right, you kind of
figure that out. Guess how Guess how I search for
things on chat GBT. I'm writing three paragraphs, but when
(15:35):
I hit send, I get all the context I need
to get all the answers, right, I get everything. And
I love it because it's efficient. In the past, I
would have to go to Google and go through four
or five websites and read through them and find the
pieces of information I want to pull out of there.
And I'm not here to bag on Google or bag
on on on websites that this is my career that
(15:55):
I'm in, So it is last thing I want to disparage.
But the evolution is what you need to carry on
with you as you evolve with the changing landscape of
how people are going to be looking for things, So
very important thing that we need to focus on, and
that's where we are changing and adjusting the things that
we're doing to account for that. I mean, it's still
(16:16):
a robot. I mean, Google's a robot. Don't let them
fool you. They have people in the background there, but
it's a big robot that's reading things. Chat GBT is
a big robot. Perplexity is a big robot, right, So
you're still feeding the robot information. You just need to
understand how it is that they digest information and then
you serve it up to them in that way. And
so changing how we structure content, we organize it in
(16:38):
a certain way that makes it easy for them to read,
because now we see how they're reading things versus how
Google crawls and interprets things, right, it's a little bit different. Yeah,
there's definitely things that you need to do to account
for that. But the reason, the thing I bring up
a lot when this question gets asked is I can
go create one hundred websites tomorrow, right, I can go
(17:00):
create one hundred websites about riffing tomorrow or whatever. It
does MEDSPA websites, so it talks about everything on the sun,
about medspas, about dentists or whatever. And so how does
Google or how does the searching I mean, how does
these AI engines determine which of these websites they want
to feature in their content? Right, who they want to recommend,
(17:22):
who they want to highlight when they're serving up answers.
Google has the same problem. So the similar scenario. The
thing that's now that this has evolved to is Google
actually trusts content less than ever right now, because it's
so it's a commodity. It's so easy to put out there.
I mean, I know guys that are just doing this
in the background, that are doing hundreds of websites and
(17:44):
things like that. They don't care about the subject content
they're writing about. They're not experts, They're just trying to
game the system. And so Google's seeing that too. So
how does Google differentiate and this is where all the
other things in the world of marketing are going to
come into plays. Is they want to Google and chat
GBT or these AI engines want to know who is
the expert. How do they determine who the expert is?
(18:05):
It's because other websites are referencing them and their content.
Guess what, that's link building from SEO. In link building,
we generate backlinks pointing to another website because we're basically
telling Google that that website is the expert. The AI
engines want to see that same information, so they're looking
for that same footprint to determine who is the leader
(18:28):
of the pack. The other thing is reviews. I mean
they when people leave reviews, that's validation that that company
is sought after or reputable or somebody they should trust.
And so in fact, if I were to say there's
anything that chat GBT is not going to be able
to replicate as reviews or validation piece, So they still
need to turn to these other sources and gather that information.
(18:51):
So anyway it evolved to your point, it evolved. It
doesn't mean it's killing Google. Google's going to be the
new AI version is all. It's gonna change in it.
There's just gonna be some competitors now, which I'm happy
with actually, so agree. That's how things revolving, and you
just you can't, you know, you need to evolve with
it or you're gonna die and somebody else is gonna
(19:12):
show up and earn that business.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
So yeah, no, you're spun on. Yeah, and guys rest
to share, like Google already rolled out, the ais are
a changing. Like you know, as you search and for
anything now there's like the little paragraph underneath that shows
you like a summary of what they Google thinks you
should know about it with a little link out. They're
just pulling from someone's website, serving up content and keeping
you in their search engines they can serve up more ads, right, Like,
(19:35):
that's how that's how they're using AI to keep you
in the search platforms so they can show you more
ads and they can make more revenue. And what that
did is that gave everyone about a thirty forty percent
hit on their their SEO traffic on their actual web page.
But if you're crushing it, like jelanis saying right now,
you understand how those AI agents and box are out
looking at content indexing and trying to find out who's
the authoritative person they can trust. And if you're winning
(19:59):
that slot where you getting your data pulled up, they're
also putting a link to your web page right there.
So this is a critical shift in se O, and
you need to work with guys like Lannie who are
paying attention. The answer isn't just spend more money on ads.
Just spend more money on ads, it's actually learn what's
changing in the industries. You can strategically pivot and then
capitalize on what's changing there.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
They want you to spend more money on ads, though,
I mean that's what they want. I mean, you don't.
Don't let them fool you. They're all about that that
AD money. But they need to keep you there for
that to work, so they're still trying to make it
a valuable resource for everybody. Anyway. I love that that
Google has competition though, I mean, I'm a big fan
of that. So I'm excited that things are evolving at
(20:40):
this point.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I totally agree. And let's get back to stacking, shall we.
Like I've got there are some things you said before
I want to I want to pivot on. So you
you mentioned as several things like you're an SEO guy,
and yet here we are, you were talking about how
we need to have or brands need to have an
omni channel presence. So it seems funny coming from an
CEO guy. He should just be telling you how SEO
(21:01):
is super important, but he's not talk to us about
these omni channel touches off digital on digital ways that
you've seen people create market synergy because it's about having
I like to call it marketing residents or brand residence
in an area. It's why having you know, three or
four like if you're a food service brand, having three
or four restaurants in a certain vacinities actually better because
(21:22):
people are seeing your billboards and your trucks and you're
whatever all over the place. Even if you're just a
single owner in that region, you're getting value from the
brand recognition and the brand residence in that market. So
talk to us about elements that people should have in
their mix that can help create that. If they are
especially home service or service oriented brands.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, I mean every home service business has a different
blend of what that should look like. Even when you
get into other industries like like is it met SPA
or medical doctors or dentists or things like that. They're
all going to have a different version of what you
just said, but you need to find what version you know.
So this is where I would go back and I
would sketch out the customer journey of you, of your customer.
(22:03):
I would just you know, there's multiple paths to people
coming and purchasing or utilizing your services. I would start
with just laying out the most common eighty twenty rule
path and where are they likely to see you. You know,
awareness of a service or a brand could come from anywhere.
It could come from like you said, billboards, it could
(22:23):
from the truck, it could come from a Facebook ad,
could be the first time somebody sees your brand or
your service. Sometimes it goes to they go to Google
and they search for it and then then they find
you when you're ranking, you know, in the top three
to ten or whatever. So we don't know where they're
going to first interact with you, but there's a variety
of ways that could happen. So when you talk about
(22:43):
omni channel, that that level the awareness level you need
to have. You need to think about where is the
most likely that your targeted audience, your targeted customer base
is most likely to see you to have that first
touch to your brand. Now, after that, everybody's gonna take
a different path and follow a different timeline to that
path of getting to the point where they actually want
(23:05):
to utilize your service or purchase your product. And so
you need to capture them, you know, at that first step,
and then you can use that and this is where
like a Facebook pixel comes into play, or you know,
you can tag somebody with a Google ad and now
that they've landed on your website, you can continue to
market to them and just be on You just want
to be on their radar, right, You just want to
(23:27):
remind them that you exist, remind them you exist, and
eventually they're going to see you in other places through
that time period and when the time comes when they're
ready to buy, when they need it, and they're like, Okay,
I've procrastinated enough. You know, I finally need to go
get a new roof, or I finally need to get
a new fence or my house painted. You know, you've
(23:48):
had a plenty of opportunities to be influenced. And this
is kind of where that omni channel presidence is. Omni
channels is mostly like digital it is like being everywhere.
When it comes to like stacking in fluence its, it's
really about being systematic and like think, actually putting a
thought and purpose behind what you think that path is
going to be. And every step of that path that
(24:10):
somebody's getting down the funnel, it changes. The messaging changes,
you know. And this is where there's a huge benefit
to having like a strong CRM is because it's easy
to get that aware. It's not easy to get awareness,
but it's easy to have that first touch point. It's
not easy to then capture that person to continue to
market to them and then guide them down that path.
I mean, some of the most effective retargeting campaigns I've
(24:33):
seen all the all the brand is doing is sending
an AD in front of somebody with a review on it.
And it's like so simple. It's not rockstar marketing messaging.
It's not super creative copy. We put an AD in
front of you and that's the one that gets clicked
on and people buy from that. You know why, because
that's like a referral. It's like they see somebody in
(24:53):
their community that is that you know, left you a
nice review recently, and and you know they're like Okay, finally, okay,
this is enough. I've had all these things happen up here.
But then that CRM sent out an email to that
person or an SMS and said, oh, we got a
new review this week, and that was like That's all
I needed, was just a little nudge in that direction.
And so anyway, I mean, the only channel mindset here is,
(25:17):
you know, think about you don't need to be everywhere.
It's expensive to be everywhere you want to be, but realistically,
you have a budget, figure out the three to five
places that you're most likely to be in front of
the right people, and then think about a mechanism when
they land on your website, how you're going to capture
them to then continue to remarket to them beyond that process. Now,
(25:38):
once they get into the sales process, now that CRM
is even you know, more important because you have control
over the pipeline where you can actually control the messaging
that goes out depending on what stage in the pipeline
they are, which is pushing them further down to that
buying process. I mean, think about how many leads are
stuck in the proposal phase. Proosal was saying too many,
(26:01):
they're just sitting there, you know, and so you know,
hitting them at that point, you can assume that ninety
percent of the people at that stage have been in
have seen the brand in multiple capacities. Like I said,
it's very rare that somebody's gonna see the brand for
the first time and pull the trigger, So you can't
assume that. So the fact they've seen you everywhere, what's
(26:21):
left to tell them at that stage. It's a different
approach at that point. So anyway, being able to like
think through the entire journey all the way to the
end and having the tools and resources to have the
right messaging at the right time, you're gonna squeeze more
sales out of that marketing campaign than you would do
it just relying on SEO by itself or Google Ads
(26:43):
by itself. There's just no way. It's not even close.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
And you mentioned two challenges, but I want to talk
about well, and I want to do a quick recap
of a few things I want everyone to pull out
of what you just said. Challenge is, especially when you're
young and it's a new let's see your franchise brand,
you don't have a thousand locations yet, right or just
every new owner is not going to have the brand residents.
Yet they want to be everywhere, they can't be, so
they have to make sure they go back to the
(27:09):
first rule of marketing, which is who's my ideal client? Right, So,
and you're intimating this, but I want to reiterate it.
If you don't actually know who your real actual client is, right,
If you don't know who your idol client is, then
you're going to try to be everywhere, you're going to
waste a lot of money. But if you know, like, hey,
I'm a roofing company, so I'm looking for somebody probably
(27:29):
thirty five to fifty. They're in a home that's this old,
it's in a neighborhood, probably in these zip codes, and
like you're you're getting pretty narrow and it's got to
be someone who owns the home, not rents the home.
And like you start using demographic and then you start
getting the psychographic information and you know who your target
market is, you can target them, right if you're not
just using Google and meta you know, audience profiling stuff,
(27:55):
but you can also upload previous client lists. You can
do things to create your target audiences, right, Like, but
it's and tell you know, who that person is your
ad spend. They are happy to throw your ad spend
in a nine year old lady in a nursing home
and a sixteen year old kid riding his bike to
go get a slurpe with his buddies, right like, oh yeah,
Like you've got to be very specific here, otherwise your
(28:16):
spend dissipates too fast.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Well yeah, I mean they go ahead. Well I was
gonna say, I mean, they those those ad platforms that
they have all that inventory where they they don't have
as to show to certain demographics. So when you don't specify,
they're going to put it right there and make that
money on their end, you know. Unfortunately, But you know,
when it comes to even when you narrow your audience
down to this perfect you know, ICPS is you know,
(28:40):
you know, ideal client profiles, what you want to build
to develop who all that messaging and stuff around, that's
super important. Your brain should provide that for you. I
really hope they are. They put some thought into it
and they hand that over and then with that, you know,
the marketing agencies could take that and then helps that
initial profiling helps them narrow the audience down. But even
(29:01):
when you have that you're that far. The likelihood that
you're going to throw an AD at those people and
they're gonna click on the ad and buy today is low,
extremely low, because there's timing factors, there's resources factors, there's
you know how you know how procrastinating is the person
I'm somebody who I need. I can pull up my
(29:21):
list of things I need around my house, and I
guess how long they've been on my list. You know,
it's like one day I'm like the pain has been
long enough, or the procrastination has happened long enough, or
I'm finally gonna go pull the trigger. But you know
what I'm gonna think about the brands I've seen and
what I'm thinking I turn to the people I've done
some early research on, right, you know, whatever it is like,
that's where I'm going to turn back to. And so,
(29:43):
you know, you can't expect a marketing campaign that's just
fresh out of the out of the gate to produce.
I mean, if you're lucky, if it breaks you even
that's why you need this multi touch approach to marketing.
And then you need longevity and time of that influence
to build up. You'll start seeing the same marketing campaign
(30:05):
produce at a higher rate towards the end of the year,
but nobody has patience for that. They're like, I did
a Facebook ad campaign. I did it for two months,
it didn't work Facebook. Then they never turned to Facebook again.
They just think it's the worst. And I'm like, Okay,
what you had how many reviews did you have too
on your Google business profile? You know you had none? Here,
like and you know now you have fifty. Okay, do
(30:26):
the same campaign and you're gonna see conversions because things
have changed. They've seen you now enough times. Nothing could
change in your campaign besides the fact that the people
that you're targeting have seen you multiple times at that point.
So anyway, I can't stress enough. Yeah, and I haven't.
You know, I'm an SEO guy. I'm probably the closest
thing to you know, producing a direct response is because
(30:50):
when people go to Google and they search for roofing contractor,
I know most of them have already done some due
diligence and have some ideas of the brands. When they
get to that point, they're right. They're closer to being
ready to buy than when they're just driving through town
and they see a billboard, right, and so but even
when I you know, we get you know, ten thousand
(31:12):
visits to a website and there might be one hundred
leads that come from that, right, I mean that means
there's nine nine hundred that had that intent, that had
that idea that they're ready to buy and still didn't buy.
So there's just you can't expect it to be this
overwhelming ratio like people seem to think when they get
into this space.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
So I agree, And you're highlighting a couple of key
things here, and and you know who, you start with
who always, and then you start to figure out where
they're going to be, right because until you know who,
you don't know where.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
But once you know where, then you need to figure
out how how am I going to market them? Like
what's what's how am I going to get their attention?
How am I going to you know, get an emotional
response they click on this thing and fill out a form,
and then then you got to figure out and that's
also how and what like what am I going to say?
What's the call to action? What am I? What am
I trying to get them to do? And then when
the last W is one A lot of people don't
think about and they're like, I want to market to
(32:06):
people all day, every day. But the reality is a
lot of your target buyers, if they're if they're generally
like fully employed, you need to be careful when you're
putting your add out because you're not going to get
a whole lot of people looking at the right time
of day that they don't have the attention span to
buy or take true action. At one o'clock in the afternoon,
but how about it twelve fifteen at lunch, how about
it seven thirty to eight thirty in the morning, how
(32:27):
about four thirty to eleven o'clock at night, Like, you
also have to think about those things if you're trying
to make your dollars get further. Seo though is omnipresent, right,
You don't have to worry about that stuff. So there
are certain channels have certain superpowers and just remember, just
remember limited budgets trying to get into multiple channels. As
Lonnie's trying to explain, like, there are a lot of
ways to do it, but you have to be smart
(32:48):
about this and your tactics have to overlap. That's what
that's where stacking comes in. You know, you Google Ads,
display adds, local radio, like all these things can stacked
up without too much dollar spend, and then and then you
can start to get some real residents talk about the
risk though, so a lot of people they're like, well,
I don't have that much money. I've got this person
barking in my ear saying, if I spend more money
(33:09):
on Google Ads, then I'll make more money. Like what
words of caution would give somebody who's hearing a message
of kind of a single channel approach.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Well, when you're I mean, first of all, you'd hope
that the brand, I mean, this is one of the
benefits of joining a franchise brand is you're hoping you're
going to get walk into a scenario where that brand
has already all these other franchisees before you have ran campaigns.
You know, there's certain agencies that have gotten results, certain
agencies that haven't are out of the way, right, I mean,
(33:39):
so you're hope, hopeful that that agency is going to
hand you off agencies that have a campaign or campaigns
that produce and so always you know, trust but verify
that that's the case. So I would always start there
when you're starting a you know, in a lot of cases,
you don't really have a choice but to start there,
because if you're going to go pull somebody on your own,
(33:59):
that's when you really have a lot more things to
worry about. So I would start there, but I wouldn't
hesitate to ask them what other franchisees you're working with? Okay,
and then say I'm going to talk to that franchise ee.
And then you call them and say how long did
it take for those to work? You know, how much
money did you spend it? Do? I just keep holding
the fort and you keep spending the money. Because what
(34:21):
happens is is, like you mentioned Google Ads, is even
when there's a proven campaign that's out there, and I've
managed hundreds of Google Ads accounts, it's not what we do,
but I've had lots of experience in it, so I
have a lot of pain that I've experienced as well.
Is you launch a proven campaign that already has the
right keywords, the right messaging, the right landing page, everything's
(34:42):
already figured out. You launch it in a new market
and it doesn't work as well as it works in
other markets, And it comes down to you know, and
I find myself talking to the franchise. You going, hey,
you have one review, I need twenty reviews and then
this seems gonna work better. And it's true. So like
part of it is you have to like let things
you know develop for it to be performance. So it
(35:03):
doesn't mean you walk away from it, you know, but
it means that you need to consider that this is
gonna take one, two, in some cases three months for
that campaign to actually develop itself into a place that
is productive. And so you have to gat some patience,
which is hard because you're just starting. You're all excited,
you have all your shiny new trucks, and you're waiting
(35:24):
for the leads and you just sit there and know
nothing's happening, and you think the Google Ads agency is
incompetent and they're like, no, I need more time. You know, Google,
Google doesn't trust you. I mean even the Google Ads
they want to take your money. But if there's already
twenty businesses in your market giving them money to run ads,
they're gonna take the real the burden of hand, and
the burden in the hand is proven campaigns that are working.
(35:44):
You're the new guy in the equation and so you
still have to earn yourself up in the rankings of ads.
Even if you're willing to give them all the money,
they're not going to give you that Premie replacement. They're
gonna spend you, put you into places that they can
make money off of you, but it's not going to
produce for you. And so you have to kind of
earn that trust in Google's eyes. So there's even a
timely factor when it comes to Google Ads, and people
(36:07):
don't know that. People just think I put mad out there,
it's not working. The agency, the campaign is not good.
Fire them, and then they move on and now they
have to start all over again, right, so you know,
partly when it comes to that risk is people walking
away too soon, not letting a campaign develop. But you
shouldn't even start this without validation that other franchises are
(36:27):
having success. Don't just take the agency's word for it.
Call them they're part of your circle. You're buying into
a brand for the intellectual capital of the brand that
comes from the brand, but it's also your peers. Take
advantage of that. There's people have lots of experience that
are gonna be able to tell you what's working for them,
how long it took, how much money they spent before
(36:47):
it started working. Get all that information so your expectations
are proper, and then go down the path. Right it could.
And I don't know what the best channel is, but
I would always start with even though I'm telling you
earlier stacking in flu this is the thing. The reality is,
I would still hone in on one channel and get
it working before you go you start going too wide.
But just be aware of the other things you need
(37:09):
to be doing that's related to that one channel as
far as that influence is concerned, and it all will
factor in. But anyway, I'm not sure if I answered
your question, Dave, But somewhere in there there's nowhere.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And there's a lot of good insights. Yeah, well you
said something, and I know you know you and I
need to wrap up here in a few minutes. But
but you said something that almost feels contradictory. So I
want to explore that for a second. You say the
words a number of times like, hey, you got to
be patient, you gotta get this this thing you work,
you gotta let it work. And yet there's the flip
side of that, which is, but you got to verify,
you gotta verify, So what's your guidance, like, how should
(37:42):
how should franchise ors who are partnering with marketing partners,
and how should franchise owners who are partnering with marketing partners?
How should they balance it to? What kind of metrics
should they be using to govern the process? Because at
the end of the day, the data is what what
tells them whether or not it's working. How should they
be trusting and yet verifying all the same time.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Well, I mean a franchise brand first and foremost, they
have the advantage of seeing all the data, right, they
see this if they if you have one agency that
you have doing Google Ads for all the franchise ease,
you get this advantage of seeing And I've I've had
this view, right, I've have had three hundred Google Ads
campaigns going on at once and forty or fifty for
(38:23):
each brand, and like I've seen the same campaign have
completely varying degrees of results. And so that information is
there and the brand should have access to it. The
problem with a lot of the brands and the marketing teams,
they're going one hundred miles an hour. You know, you
get to like say, hey, if I was a franchise
you know, can you share with me past results like
(38:45):
the last six months of this campaign and things so
like it's it's KPIs are one thing. I mean, I
can really get in the nuance of things if you
looking at on the KPI level. But I don't think
that's what we need to talk about here today. But
you you, the brand should have something. They should have
something for you even if they you know, if they don't,
it's a disservice to their whole system. Because if I
(39:06):
was a franchise ee, I trust the brand. I'm you know,
I would, That's what I paid for, right, And so
I'm hoping that they're they're recommending agencies and campaigns that
are working. But if they are, that means there's data
that that came from. They're not just going, yeah, you know,
Lonnie's a good guy. You know you work with him,
like they're they're believe me, every brand I have, I
(39:28):
have dashboards of data that aggregates all those franchisees and
it also shows each franchise individually. And if the marketing
team is able to have that, at the very least,
they can look at that in five minutes and then
pass on to the new franchise z what they can expect, right,
and so that should be the first place I would
turn to. But if I was a franchise ee, I
(39:50):
would take that and accept that. But I also would
ask some franchise's that I know are are still using
that agency or that campaign, and maybe some that aren't,
maybe they quit too soon or not. So you still
want to take everything the grain of salt. But I
know Google ads works, I know Facebook Ads works, I
know every channel you mentioned, tiktoks, all those things work
(40:13):
at different capacities. The question is is that they have
enough time to develop the strategy that works, you know.
And so sometimes an agency will get a bad rap
or a campaign gets kicked out. It's usually because it
wasn't it didn't have time to get developed. And so anyway,
like somewhere somewhere along the lines, as a franchise ee,
(40:34):
you need to look out for yourself and your budget,
but trust the brand, ask franchisees and then have an expectation,
you know, ask the agency themselves what is the expectation here? When?
What does a success look like? How long do you
think you know a lot? We're going to like screw
it around that conversation and be like, well maybe in
(40:55):
thirty days or but like, you know, take it all,
all those three pillars of information that you're getting from
the from other franchise. He's an agency, will help you
determine whether it's something you want to pursue. But when
you commit to it, please give them ninety days at least.
And I would really give any campaign six months before
I say, hey, let's just be real here, this isn't working.
(41:17):
And you know, nobody wants to wait that long or
spend the money to get through that point. But I
think it's if you've done the first three things I
mentioned as far as validation, you should at least give
it that amount of time before you give up on it.
See it through at that point.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
And maybe maybe the next time we get together we
talk about marketing metrics, right, because there are key things.
You know, there are key things that to be looking at,
but they have to wait. Right. You can't say, oh,
I'm going to have massive volumes of visitors on my
website when I just launched the website as a new franchise.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah, that's thing.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
But you're brilliant, Like validation happens in the buying process.
Validation should continue to happen throughout the rest of the
time you run your business. You want to change marketing partners, excellent,
you better have four or five people who who shared
the same feedback you that it was a game change
or it brought them from point A to point C
and they're really grateful they did it. If you can't
(42:08):
get that, then you need to make sure you're being
cautious with your spend. Sometimes the knee jerk reaction just
to pull the plug on a marketing partner because you're
bug you're not getting the results you want. It might
be there because your spend isn't right, or your focus
isn't right, or they're doing something wrong. But if if
you're sixty days in and you're expecting results that are unlikely,
then it doesn't matter who you work with, you're gonna
(42:29):
be pulling the plug and then taking a sixty day
trip back in time and then starting over. So I'm
with you, and I agree.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
Well, it's I mean, it's worse when you go and pulling.
At least when you trust a preferred marketing agency that
a brand brings you, there's probably a campaign that they
piloted or they've ran already for a while, so there's
there's that advantage. They've already figured the things that don't
work out to an extent, right depending on the agency.
But if you then quit them and then you go
(42:58):
look in your backyard and you try to find somebody locally,
you're starting from zero. Like at least with the franchise
marketing agency, you've pat your you know, your months of
data and strategy has been developed. Whereas when you start
from zero, it's it's gonna be even longer unless the
person just gets lucky or hits a home run, you know,
which is partially experience but partially luck, I'm telling you.
(43:22):
Then you know, you run the risk of it going
another ninety days of nothing, and then it's that person
needs even more time to develop it. So I'd be
reluctant to turn to my backyard. You know, if you're
going to move away from an agency that the brand recommends,
like find somebody in your niche you know that focuses
on the industries that you're in. Look for agencies that
just specialize in them. At least on the paid ads side,
(43:44):
they're more likely to get have a campaign that's proven
because they've used the same campaigns and all their clients,
and they'll probably queue that up and have some level
of success with you. But don't, don't just get your
nephew to turn Facebook ads on. Please don't.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
It's audience look alike, audience. Here's the power of that,
right in both Google ads and Facebook ads and meta ads.
We'll talk about those two for two seconds. Like the
most the most powerful people that can have the most
impact on your success to the people who are already
doing it with either your peers, your your your like
local franchise owners across a big area you know, nationwide perhaps,
(44:21):
or somebody who's, like you said, an industry expert. And
I've got I've got a bunch of partners I work
with it that do ads, right, that's what they focus on.
One of them only does meta ads, and they crush
it because they only do meta ads, and they'll like
own a category like roofing and they so now because
they do that, they're working with four hundred different locations
that are doing roofing. And they've told me before, like
(44:43):
man Dave, like this, we had this idea, we tried
it in this market and it was a home run
home run, and so we lifted the concept, we applied
it to four hundred other locations, and now I've got
four hundred home runs happening. But we figured out that
worked because we saw the metric spike and then realize
what we've done, and then we replicated the strategy, like
that's somebody you want in your freaking corner, and somebody
(45:05):
who owns SEO you want in your corner. So like
you need to find these people that are functional experts.
And you've told this to me many times before, but
it's really hard to find a single stop shop where
they're a fantastic resource and SEO and a fantastic resource
in paid Google and a fantastic resource and resources and
paid Facebook. Like usually that doesn't exist in the same
(45:26):
in the same group. So just be really really cautious
about about people who make too many promises that are
too broad an omnichannel. You need omni channel strategies, but
it's not often with one group of people, right.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
I mean, you can depends on what industry you're in.
I mean, if you're in a competitive space like roofing
or water damage restoration or dental implants or something that's
a higher competitive scale. You know, if the only way
you're gonna win is by having the best, it's the
only way. It's not just you're thrown at up there
and it's gonna work. You know, you need the best
Facebook Ads guy, the best the best Google as guy,
(46:02):
and the best SEO guy. Otherwise, you know, and I
hate to say it, but like a lot of these
other agencies will be good at one of those things,
then they do the other things as a service to
the brand, but then they're not the best at it,
and they're good at one thing and not good at
other things. So you know that that's pretty much why
I focus on SEO. I mean, I have enough experience
(46:22):
with Google Ads to probably offer that as a service.
But the last thing I want to do is take
somebody's money that I'm not the best at delivering a
result on and I could great it can I can
deliver a minimal result you may not even know the difference,
and a lot of people will accept that. But I
just can't sleep at night doing that. So I'm either
going to go all in, lean into something heavily, and
(46:43):
know that I'm doing everything I can to maximize the
result and the only thing I had to have my
twenty thousand hours of SEO. I have almost ten thousand
hours of Google Ads, but I'm here telling you I
will not do Google ads for anybody because I'm still
not the best at it, you know, And that's kind
of where that mindset carries through to the results, you know,
(47:03):
and anyway to point, I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
I'm with you on that one, guys. You know, first,
thanks Lonnie, everyone listening. I hope that you've pulled several
nuggets out of this, including like why you need to
have a stacked marketing strategy, how you can do it,
what are some elements, what's the sequence you should maybe
do some of these things, and why you got to
work with functional experts. Like I'm just thinking about all
the insights that I'm pulling from this and the notes
I'm taking, and and uh, you know, I'm sure at
(47:29):
some point we'll have to have you back to maybe
do a part two on this one. But thanks so
much for sharing all those insights with us, Lonnie.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
All right, thanks for having me, And you know, I
can jump on here anytime and just talk talk talk,
so you know, don't hesitate to ask. Of course, thanks,
thanks for having me
All right, guys, Hey, I've got another great episode of
the Advisory Board podcast here, And as you know, we
bring in experts from the franchise community to help coach
you on specific elements, strategies, tactics, things you can do
that will help you build a franchise brand that will last.
Now I've got with me today, I've got Lonnie Jones.
If you don't know Lonnie Jones, you probably need to
and you're gonna get to know him a little bit
(00:22):
better today. But he's been in franchise marketing for years
and he is the co founder. While he's the founder
and the CEO of Local SEO Help, He's done a
ton of work with a lot of big brands. Guys.
You know, if you've ever heard of a little platform
company called Horsepower Brands, I guess you know he's worked
with them, works with a ton of home service brands,
(00:43):
people that specialize in like he specializes in competitive categories
and for SEO. If you don't know what that means,
it means he's got Cojon's Because most people will just
take your money and like screw it up or just
do a mediocre job. But he actually helps people crush
SEO get people in top five in their categories. But
he's he's got a ton of a ton of accolades.
He's built the what is it called the Franchise SEO
(01:05):
Masterclasses on franchisors dot com. So really knows this stuff.
Likes to give back to the community. And as we
were talking, I was like, oh, man, like, we got
to get you on the on the podcast. We can
get you to share some of your insights with all
these folks who are trying to dial in se oh
a lot of other categories of digital marketing. I haven't
been working for people. This is tried and trude and
it's a long term asset. Really. But before I dive
(01:27):
in to the topic, uh, you got to know that
he loves he loves bourbon dogs and growing heirloom tomatoes
that one off guard and uh yeah, lives up in
northern Idaho up on a beautiful lake. If you ever
heard of quart A Lane. He moved there after the
skin has moved out, so don't worry about that. And
uh but but really, brilliant guy. Now, Lonnie, I've bragged
(01:49):
on you a little tell us a little bit more
about you. Tell us about local SEO help, and then
let's jump into our topic, which is how do you
create a stacked marketing approach and franchising go for it?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Man? All right, well, thanks for having me on here.
I appreciate you spending the time to ask me some
questions and chit chat about franchise marketing and whatever else
we end up talking about today. I guess if I
were to go back into my background that led me
to this point today, I don't consider myself a marketer
because I didn't start my path down this road as
(02:18):
a marketer. I was an entrepreneur. So I relate very
heavily to all the franchise brand founders out there, all
the franchise e's out there. Everybody has that entrepreneur mindset,
all trying to leverage that and grow and build an
empire or whatever it is that they're trying to develop
in order to build their dream. It all starts with
having a mindset of being an entrepreneur. And that's just
(02:40):
kind of where I always looked at myself. In college,
I had a finance degree, so I was a numbers guy.
I was analyzing the stock market. I was doing things
like that, which you know a lot of people still
do to this day. But that's kind of where my
mind started. Won some business plan competition, so I don't know,
I just really had that itch. Graduated, got a cubical
(03:01):
job for the government, quickly learned that's not for me.
And I think a lot of the people that are
going to watch this can relate to that, especially in
their franchise space. It only I'm the only person you'll
meet that quit a government job. I mean, I'm the
only idiot that would actually do something like that. But
before I quit it, guess what, I started a business
and so but at that point I had a finance
(03:23):
degree an accounting background. So I started a little accounting
firm and was picked up clients all over southern California
area at that point and was supporting them in their accounting.
I had teams helping me, and that's where I started.
Just it was the itch. It wasn't the accounting piece,
it wasn't the finance piece. It was just that was
my mechanism. I really just wanted to start a business somehow.
(03:46):
That led me to working with one of my clients
at the time was in a marketing agency and I
was doing, you know, the accounting for them. And I said, hey,
this is interesting, and I got to know them very well.
And just since I'm always thinking a business ideas, I said,
and the Internet at that point, you know, I'm old.
I'm forty five, so the Internet was fairly new then.
I was like, I want to start an Internet company.
(04:06):
You know what a brilliant idea that everybody on this
planet seems to have, and pitched it to my marketing
agency client at the time. I said, I have this
business idea. You helped me with it. They said, yeah,
we'll be partners, gave me a budget, we built it,
grew that very successfully. Now that's how I learned all
this Internet stuff. I was an accountant and I was
(04:28):
selling products on e commerce e commerce website, and I
literally picked a book up called The Art of SEO,
which is an old book. They still have versions of
it to this day, very known in the SEO space.
And that's why I learned that CEO. I have a book,
believe it or not, and just started applying what I
was reading and I started getting more interested in it
and stuff started working, and I was like, well, maybe
(04:48):
I know something you know, And so ended up ranking
number one for a lot of super competitive keywords in
the industry I was in, and I was like, well,
maybe I know something. So anyway, that business ended up
getting sold to a publicly traded company, and I was like,
what am I gonna do with my life? You know
this entrepreneur mindset. I've grown a successful business. What do
I do now? Well, guess what happened. Everybody in my
(05:10):
industry called me up and said, Lona, you heard what happened.
You know, can you help us with SEO? I'm like,
what are you talking about? Help you with SEO? That's
what I guess. I was known as the guy who
ranked number one. That was their takeaway from me. In
my mind, I was a business owner and I was
just like learning how to do this thing to help me. So,
you know the way I started with that, I'm not
the person out there trying to sell you marketing services
(05:32):
for the sake of selling marketing services, Like I totally
understand that this stuff needs to work, it needs to
be efficient. You're thinking about your budgets, and so I
think because I've been that way and my desire to
go deep into things and really learn something, it just
kept carrying on over the years and more referrals would
come my way. I never did marketing, really, I've never
(05:53):
been on podcasts and things like this. Over All the
early years of my career, just kept getting referrals and
growing to an agency, to the point where I didn't
even know I was an agency. It was just me
and some people helping me, and we were helping businesses
and getting having success, and we just kept getting more.
And then like one day, I'm you know, in my
community of digital marketers and SEO guys, and they're all
(06:15):
comparing notes on their agencies, and I'm like, wait a minute,
I'm way bigger when it comes to an agency. I
have way more clients than all you guys, like, and
I didn't even think of myself as an agency. I
guess I should start thinking that way. So anyway, that's
kind of how I became an agency. And then in
the midst of that, you know, referrals come my way.
I got handed over a very aggressive franchise group of
(06:39):
owners that owned a bunch of franchise locations, and they said, hey, Lona,
we know for good things about you. We work for
franchisees under X, Y and Z brain. I don't want
to name names, and we're not doing very well. We
want to get somebody outside to come in and help us.
And I said, all right, well, let me give it
a shot. Had a lot of success with them, and
that's how I started enfranchising. And because I had sex
(06:59):
with six that's with them, they were big known people
in the industry. They would then, you know, roll up
to the franchise brands that they were under and say, hey,
you need to talk to Lonnie. You need to talk
to Lonnie. And so that led me to working with
brands because they would listen to me and go, you know,
I'm sure they were annoyed, right, You know how brands
are the franchisees are all poking and prodding at them,
(07:20):
and now they bring this a marketing guy. They've never
heard of it. So and I'm a pretty loudmouth guy,
so I have no problem you know, speaking what I
think and speaking what I know. And so eventually I
broke through started helping brands. And I just gave you
the very long winded answer of how I got into
the franchise space and where I am today. Now we
work with many brands in the in the you know,
(07:41):
a lot of them are highly successful, a lot of
growth rates and that are the leaders in the space.
So anyway, that's the beginning and the end of my
process how I got here today. Dave, thank you, No,
I appreciate it. And you guys, it's gonna be a
three and a half hour podcast today.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Just want to get warnings that because that's the first
thirty seven questions. Kidding Lonnie's great, guys. I want to
I want to clarify. Somebody said with that group of
original owners, he didn't have sex with them, he had
ask with them. So I just want to make sure
you know that's not part of the program.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
See, Dave, I thought you just auld edit that out.
I was trying to like not adjust that. Now here
you are bringing it.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
We're leading into it.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Brother, Yeah, please clarify, I did not I did not
go down that path.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
No, that was not the path. This is only se O.
Those are the only three like that for clearing that. Yeah,
you're welcome. So, uh, let's talk about stacked. So so
when the reason why we want to get together is
because you were talking when we were we were brainstorming
about some things. Uh, a potential mutual client, and you
start talking about this concept of creating a stacked marketing approach,
(08:47):
and I was like, like you were saying words like yes, yes, yes,
like I see it and I believe it, and we
should we should build this out together as content. So
maybe what you could do is like tell us a
little bit how what a stacking mean to you or
what is a stack influence process? Like how do stacked
marketing work? And then we'll kind of break it apart
together and dig into that.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, tell you where it came from. I mean a
lot of there's a lot of misconceptions out there with
franchise e'se. I mean, franchise's. What they want to do
is they want to start their business and they want
to go out there and do marketing, marketing and generate
business sales, leads, whatever it may be. And there's this
misconception that they can just go set up Facebook ads,
(09:28):
you know, they can do it themselves even and throw
an ad out there and the leads are just gonna
people are going to see that ad and they're just
going to be dying for that product or service. I'm
here to tell you that's never gonna happen. Okay, that's
never going to happen. And it barely could happen if
somebody's really good at Facebook ads or Google ads or
SEO or you know, even offline things like print and
(09:51):
ed d M, and there's just lots of ways you
can market. But people think that there's a direct response
in every every advertisement or every marketing channel out there,
and it's just never ever in the history of marketing
as that happened, in my opinion. I mean, I'm sure
there's there's there's there's a scenario where that's happened, but
as a whole, it doesn't happen that way. But that's
what people think. They I'm gonna do an ad and
(10:12):
the leads are gonna pour. It never happens. And so
you know, I work with a lot of existing franchisees,
So I would get into a new franchise brand and
they would hand me the keys to the kingdom. And
I have franchisees from the full spectrum. Some have been
around for five years, six years, seven years, and some
of them that are just launching today. Now I would
apply the same marketing to both groups of people, and
(10:34):
I would learn that the people have been in business
for six or seven years. The conversion rate is sky
high compared to the people that are coming out of
the gate from scratch. I'm like, wow, it's the same marketing,
it's the same.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Strategy of franchises, right, Like the majority of them aren't old, like,
the majority of them are new form, growing, grow and grow. Right. So, yeah,
it's a bit of a problem. Sorry to cut you out.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So no, it's great, I mean I and so like
you start thinking about what is it that's making that happen. Well,
the one thing is the franchisees have been around for years.
They've had a chance to be out there and influence people.
Over all those years, there's been different marketing channels. They
see their trucks driving around town, they see the yard
signs in front of job sites for home service businesses
(11:18):
or similar things like. That's where people in their local
markets are getting some type of exposure to them or influence.
And when they then are doing a Facebook ad out
there and that those saying people end up seeing that ad,
then they're more likely to pull the trigger, right, And
so I don't know, I just hate the idea that
(11:41):
the expectation with franchise ease and even in some cases
the brand's marketing teams even still are having This interpretation
is we're going to do an advertising campaign this and
generate generate business and that's it. So and I've seen
so many franchisees struggle. They're going through different marketing agencies.
They think that's how it's supposed to be. It's never
(12:01):
going to be that way. But if I was a
CMO for a brand, what I would what I would
do is I would consider all the areas that a
consumer would potentially be interact with my brand, right and
so that could be offline the same thing I mentioned
trucks driving by. It could be yard signs, things like that.
(12:22):
They're going to see that. That's going to create some
level of impression influence. They're going to see a Facebook ad,
They're going to go to a home show and see them.
Then they might when the timing is right, when they're
ready to go, pull the trigger. They go to Google.
They type in you know roofing, I need a roofing replacement.
And now they go and Google pops up twenty businesses,
(12:43):
ten businesses, three businesses. Guess which one they're going to
gravitate towards the one that they've seen. But I mean,
but people still think that you can do a Google
ad campaign or a Facebook head campaign and someone's going
to click on that ad and go pull the trigger.
It's just not going to happen. And so when I
when I when I, you know. So the concept of
(13:03):
the stacking influence is more around the idea that it's
a strategy. You know, it's not just a direct response
or AD lead AD lead. Less than one percent of
the people that are going to see AD are going
to pull the trigger. You've spent money to be seen
by one hundred percent of them. What are you going
to do with the other ninety nine percent? You know?
And So anyway, that's kind of where this concept originated from,
(13:24):
and just trying to get a little bit of you know,
discussion out there so franchisees can really have the right
expectations and think differently about how they might approach their
local marketing.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, when they let's dial it in for a second
round SEO, right, because I think for a while, SEO
became a lot less sexy, Like, hey, Facebook and meta
ads came out and everyone wanted to spend money on
Google ads and blah blah blah. Right, if there's a
new channel, we should get on Vine? Oh we should
get on TikTok Wait it's going to way wait it's back. Okay,
Like everyone's thinking about all the new channels so much,
(13:56):
and they're so hot and interesting that they're like that
that crazy appetitzes that shows upon the menu once and
never shows up again. Right, Sometimes these marketing channels are
kind of like that. One of the things that's really
critical about se and I want to give you a
chance to rip on this, but I want to que
it up for you, is the SEO landscape is changing
yet again, right and it's and it's changing the way.
(14:18):
That's interesting because how many people are now using Perplexity
or open AI as their search engines and not Google.
And these search these AI engines are not searching Google
ads for keywords. They are only searching SEO and they're
optimizing answers that are coming from web pages that have
excellent SEO that can be used to repurpose and easily
(14:39):
serve up the content back to their consumer. So can
you maybe share just for a second, like some of
the things that are shifting around that consumer search behavior
and how that makes SEO even more important to double
down on right now?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Oh now, I love that topic of me. I actually
been asked that some similar version of that quite often,
because people are thinking, well, are you afraid SEO going
to die? I'm like, I say, it was not dying.
It's just shifting. It's already shifted one hundred times in
all the years I've been doing this, and it's just
gonna It's gonna shift a hundred times more before I
retire one day. But right now it's definitely shifting into
(15:12):
the AI platforms. And I love that. You understand that,
I mean, you understand that those are also search engines.
You know what. I use chat shipt all the damn time,
and and you know why, Because I ask it a question,
I can give it context. You know my questions. You
can tell I talk a lot, right, you kind of
figure that out. Guess how Guess how I search for
things on chat GBT. I'm writing three paragraphs, but when
(15:35):
I hit send, I get all the context I need
to get all the answers, right, I get everything. And
I love it because it's efficient. In the past, I
would have to go to Google and go through four
or five websites and read through them and find the
pieces of information I want to pull out of there.
And I'm not here to bag on Google or bag
on on on websites that this is my career that
(15:55):
I'm in, So it is last thing I want to disparage.
But the evolution is what you need to carry on
with you as you evolve with the changing landscape of
how people are going to be looking for things, So
very important thing that we need to focus on, and
that's where we are changing and adjusting the things that
we're doing to account for that. I mean, it's still
(16:16):
a robot. I mean, Google's a robot. Don't let them
fool you. They have people in the background there, but
it's a big robot that's reading things. Chat GBT is
a big robot. Perplexity is a big robot, right, So
you're still feeding the robot information. You just need to
understand how it is that they digest information and then
you serve it up to them in that way. And
so changing how we structure content, we organize it in
(16:38):
a certain way that makes it easy for them to read,
because now we see how they're reading things versus how
Google crawls and interprets things, right, it's a little bit different. Yeah,
there's definitely things that you need to do to account
for that. But the reason, the thing I bring up
a lot when this question gets asked is I can
go create one hundred websites tomorrow, right, I can go
(17:00):
create one hundred websites about riffing tomorrow or whatever. It
does MEDSPA websites, so it talks about everything on the sun,
about medspas, about dentists or whatever. And so how does
Google or how does the searching I mean, how does
these AI engines determine which of these websites they want
to feature in their content? Right, who they want to recommend,
(17:22):
who they want to highlight when they're serving up answers.
Google has the same problem. So the similar scenario. The
thing that's now that this has evolved to is Google
actually trusts content less than ever right now, because it's
so it's a commodity. It's so easy to put out there.
I mean, I know guys that are just doing this
in the background, that are doing hundreds of websites and
(17:44):
things like that. They don't care about the subject content
they're writing about. They're not experts, They're just trying to
game the system. And so Google's seeing that too. So
how does Google differentiate and this is where all the
other things in the world of marketing are going to
come into plays. Is they want to Google and chat
GBT or these AI engines want to know who is
the expert. How do they determine who the expert is?
(18:05):
It's because other websites are referencing them and their content.
Guess what, that's link building from SEO. In link building,
we generate backlinks pointing to another website because we're basically
telling Google that that website is the expert. The AI
engines want to see that same information, so they're looking
for that same footprint to determine who is the leader
(18:28):
of the pack. The other thing is reviews. I mean
they when people leave reviews, that's validation that that company
is sought after or reputable or somebody they should trust.
And so in fact, if I were to say there's
anything that chat GBT is not going to be able
to replicate as reviews or validation piece, So they still
need to turn to these other sources and gather that information.
(18:51):
So anyway it evolved to your point, it evolved. It
doesn't mean it's killing Google. Google's going to be the
new AI version is all. It's gonna change in it.
There's just gonna be some competitors now, which I'm happy
with actually, so agree. That's how things revolving, and you
just you can't, you know, you need to evolve with
it or you're gonna die and somebody else is gonna
(19:12):
show up and earn that business.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
So yeah, no, you're spun on. Yeah, and guys rest
to share, like Google already rolled out, the ais are
a changing. Like you know, as you search and for
anything now there's like the little paragraph underneath that shows
you like a summary of what they Google thinks you
should know about it with a little link out. They're
just pulling from someone's website, serving up content and keeping
you in their search engines they can serve up more ads, right, Like,
(19:35):
that's how that's how they're using AI to keep you
in the search platforms so they can show you more
ads and they can make more revenue. And what that
did is that gave everyone about a thirty forty percent
hit on their their SEO traffic on their actual web page.
But if you're crushing it, like jelanis saying right now,
you understand how those AI agents and box are out
looking at content indexing and trying to find out who's
the authoritative person they can trust. And if you're winning
(19:59):
that slot where you getting your data pulled up, they're
also putting a link to your web page right there.
So this is a critical shift in se O, and
you need to work with guys like Lannie who are
paying attention. The answer isn't just spend more money on ads.
Just spend more money on ads, it's actually learn what's
changing in the industries. You can strategically pivot and then
capitalize on what's changing there.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
They want you to spend more money on ads, though,
I mean that's what they want. I mean, you don't.
Don't let them fool you. They're all about that that
AD money. But they need to keep you there for
that to work, so they're still trying to make it
a valuable resource for everybody. Anyway. I love that that
Google has competition though, I mean, I'm a big fan
of that. So I'm excited that things are evolving at
(20:40):
this point.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I totally agree. And let's get back to stacking, shall we.
Like I've got there are some things you said before
I want to I want to pivot on. So you
you mentioned as several things like you're an SEO guy,
and yet here we are, you were talking about how
we need to have or brands need to have an
omni channel presence. So it seems funny coming from an
CEO guy. He should just be telling you how SEO
(21:01):
is super important, but he's not talk to us about
these omni channel touches off digital on digital ways that
you've seen people create market synergy because it's about having
I like to call it marketing residents or brand residence
in an area. It's why having you know, three or
four like if you're a food service brand, having three
or four restaurants in a certain vacinities actually better because
(21:22):
people are seeing your billboards and your trucks and you're
whatever all over the place. Even if you're just a
single owner in that region, you're getting value from the
brand recognition and the brand residence in that market. So
talk to us about elements that people should have in
their mix that can help create that. If they are
especially home service or service oriented brands.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, I mean every home service business has a different
blend of what that should look like. Even when you
get into other industries like like is it met SPA
or medical doctors or dentists or things like that. They're
all going to have a different version of what you
just said, but you need to find what version you know.
So this is where I would go back and I
would sketch out the customer journey of you, of your customer.
(22:03):
I would just you know, there's multiple paths to people
coming and purchasing or utilizing your services. I would start
with just laying out the most common eighty twenty rule
path and where are they likely to see you. You know,
awareness of a service or a brand could come from anywhere.
It could come from like you said, billboards, it could
(22:23):
from the truck, it could come from a Facebook ad,
could be the first time somebody sees your brand or
your service. Sometimes it goes to they go to Google
and they search for it and then then they find
you when you're ranking, you know, in the top three
to ten or whatever. So we don't know where they're
going to first interact with you, but there's a variety
of ways that could happen. So when you talk about
(22:43):
omni channel, that that level the awareness level you need
to have. You need to think about where is the
most likely that your targeted audience, your targeted customer base
is most likely to see you to have that first
touch to your brand. Now, after that, everybody's gonna take
a different path and follow a different timeline to that
path of getting to the point where they actually want
(23:05):
to utilize your service or purchase your product. And so
you need to capture them, you know, at that first step,
and then you can use that and this is where
like a Facebook pixel comes into play, or you know,
you can tag somebody with a Google ad and now
that they've landed on your website, you can continue to
market to them and just be on You just want
to be on their radar, right, You just want to
(23:27):
remind them that you exist, remind them you exist, and
eventually they're going to see you in other places through
that time period and when the time comes when they're
ready to buy, when they need it, and they're like, Okay,
I've procrastinated enough. You know, I finally need to go
get a new roof, or I finally need to get
a new fence or my house painted. You know, you've
(23:48):
had a plenty of opportunities to be influenced. And this
is kind of where that omni channel presidence is. Omni
channels is mostly like digital it is like being everywhere.
When it comes to like stacking in fluence its, it's
really about being systematic and like think, actually putting a
thought and purpose behind what you think that path is
going to be. And every step of that path that
(24:10):
somebody's getting down the funnel, it changes. The messaging changes,
you know. And this is where there's a huge benefit
to having like a strong CRM is because it's easy
to get that aware. It's not easy to get awareness,
but it's easy to have that first touch point. It's
not easy to then capture that person to continue to
market to them and then guide them down that path.
I mean, some of the most effective retargeting campaigns I've
(24:33):
seen all the all the brand is doing is sending
an AD in front of somebody with a review on it.
And it's like so simple. It's not rockstar marketing messaging.
It's not super creative copy. We put an AD in
front of you and that's the one that gets clicked
on and people buy from that. You know why, because
that's like a referral. It's like they see somebody in
(24:53):
their community that is that you know, left you a
nice review recently, and and you know they're like Okay, finally, okay,
this is enough. I've had all these things happen up here.
But then that CRM sent out an email to that
person or an SMS and said, oh, we got a
new review this week, and that was like That's all
I needed, was just a little nudge in that direction.
And so anyway, I mean, the only channel mindset here is,
(25:17):
you know, think about you don't need to be everywhere.
It's expensive to be everywhere you want to be, but realistically,
you have a budget, figure out the three to five
places that you're most likely to be in front of
the right people, and then think about a mechanism when
they land on your website, how you're going to capture
them to then continue to remarket to them beyond that process. Now,
(25:38):
once they get into the sales process, now that CRM
is even you know, more important because you have control
over the pipeline where you can actually control the messaging
that goes out depending on what stage in the pipeline
they are, which is pushing them further down to that
buying process. I mean, think about how many leads are
stuck in the proposal phase. Proosal was saying too many,
(26:01):
they're just sitting there, you know, and so you know,
hitting them at that point, you can assume that ninety
percent of the people at that stage have been in
have seen the brand in multiple capacities. Like I said,
it's very rare that somebody's gonna see the brand for
the first time and pull the trigger, So you can't
assume that. So the fact they've seen you everywhere, what's
(26:21):
left to tell them at that stage. It's a different
approach at that point. So anyway, being able to like
think through the entire journey all the way to the
end and having the tools and resources to have the
right messaging at the right time, you're gonna squeeze more
sales out of that marketing campaign than you would do
it just relying on SEO by itself or Google Ads
(26:43):
by itself. There's just no way. It's not even close.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
And you mentioned two challenges, but I want to talk
about well, and I want to do a quick recap
of a few things I want everyone to pull out
of what you just said. Challenge is, especially when you're
young and it's a new let's see your franchise brand,
you don't have a thousand locations yet, right or just
every new owner is not going to have the brand residents.
Yet they want to be everywhere, they can't be, so
they have to make sure they go back to the
(27:09):
first rule of marketing, which is who's my ideal client? Right, So,
and you're intimating this, but I want to reiterate it.
If you don't actually know who your real actual client is, right,
If you don't know who your idol client is, then
you're going to try to be everywhere, you're going to
waste a lot of money. But if you know, like, hey,
I'm a roofing company, so I'm looking for somebody probably
(27:29):
thirty five to fifty. They're in a home that's this old,
it's in a neighborhood, probably in these zip codes, and
like you're you're getting pretty narrow and it's got to
be someone who owns the home, not rents the home.
And like you start using demographic and then you start
getting the psychographic information and you know who your target
market is, you can target them, right if you're not
just using Google and meta you know, audience profiling stuff,
(27:55):
but you can also upload previous client lists. You can
do things to create your target audiences, right, Like, but
it's and tell you know, who that person is your
ad spend. They are happy to throw your ad spend
in a nine year old lady in a nursing home
and a sixteen year old kid riding his bike to
go get a slurpe with his buddies, right like, oh yeah,
Like you've got to be very specific here, otherwise your
(28:16):
spend dissipates too fast.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Well yeah, I mean they go ahead. Well I was
gonna say, I mean, they those those ad platforms that
they have all that inventory where they they don't have
as to show to certain demographics. So when you don't specify,
they're going to put it right there and make that
money on their end, you know. Unfortunately, But you know,
when it comes to even when you narrow your audience
down to this perfect you know, ICPS is you know,
(28:40):
you know, ideal client profiles, what you want to build
to develop who all that messaging and stuff around, that's
super important. Your brain should provide that for you. I
really hope they are. They put some thought into it
and they hand that over and then with that, you know,
the marketing agencies could take that and then helps that
initial profiling helps them narrow the audience down. But even
(29:01):
when you have that you're that far. The likelihood that
you're going to throw an AD at those people and
they're gonna click on the ad and buy today is low,
extremely low, because there's timing factors, there's resources factors, there's
you know how you know how procrastinating is the person
I'm somebody who I need. I can pull up my
(29:21):
list of things I need around my house, and I
guess how long they've been on my list. You know,
it's like one day I'm like the pain has been
long enough, or the procrastination has happened long enough, or
I'm finally gonna go pull the trigger. But you know
what I'm gonna think about the brands I've seen and
what I'm thinking I turn to the people I've done
some early research on, right, you know, whatever it is like,
that's where I'm going to turn back to. And so,
(29:43):
you know, you can't expect a marketing campaign that's just
fresh out of the out of the gate to produce.
I mean, if you're lucky, if it breaks you even
that's why you need this multi touch approach to marketing.
And then you need longevity and time of that influence
to build up. You'll start seeing the same marketing campaign
(30:05):
produce at a higher rate towards the end of the year,
but nobody has patience for that. They're like, I did
a Facebook ad campaign. I did it for two months,
it didn't work Facebook. Then they never turned to Facebook again.
They just think it's the worst. And I'm like, Okay,
what you had how many reviews did you have too
on your Google business profile? You know you had none? Here,
like and you know now you have fifty. Okay, do
(30:26):
the same campaign and you're gonna see conversions because things
have changed. They've seen you now enough times. Nothing could
change in your campaign besides the fact that the people
that you're targeting have seen you multiple times at that point.
So anyway, I can't stress enough. Yeah, and I haven't.
You know, I'm an SEO guy. I'm probably the closest
thing to you know, producing a direct response is because
(30:50):
when people go to Google and they search for roofing contractor,
I know most of them have already done some due
diligence and have some ideas of the brands. When they
get to that point, they're right. They're closer to being
ready to buy than when they're just driving through town
and they see a billboard, right, and so but even
when I you know, we get you know, ten thousand
(31:12):
visits to a website and there might be one hundred
leads that come from that, right, I mean that means
there's nine nine hundred that had that intent, that had
that idea that they're ready to buy and still didn't buy.
So there's just you can't expect it to be this
overwhelming ratio like people seem to think when they get
into this space.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
So I agree, And you're highlighting a couple of key
things here, and and you know who, you start with
who always, and then you start to figure out where
they're going to be, right because until you know who,
you don't know where.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
But once you know where, then you need to figure
out how how am I going to market them? Like
what's what's how am I going to get their attention?
How am I going to you know, get an emotional
response they click on this thing and fill out a form,
and then then you got to figure out and that's
also how and what like what am I going to say?
What's the call to action? What am I? What am
I trying to get them to do? And then when
the last W is one A lot of people don't
think about and they're like, I want to market to
(32:06):
people all day, every day. But the reality is a
lot of your target buyers, if they're if they're generally
like fully employed, you need to be careful when you're
putting your add out because you're not going to get
a whole lot of people looking at the right time
of day that they don't have the attention span to
buy or take true action. At one o'clock in the afternoon,
but how about it twelve fifteen at lunch, how about
it seven thirty to eight thirty in the morning, how
(32:27):
about four thirty to eleven o'clock at night, Like, you
also have to think about those things if you're trying
to make your dollars get further. Seo though is omnipresent, right,
You don't have to worry about that stuff. So there
are certain channels have certain superpowers and just remember, just
remember limited budgets trying to get into multiple channels. As
Lonnie's trying to explain, like, there are a lot of
ways to do it, but you have to be smart
(32:48):
about this and your tactics have to overlap. That's what
that's where stacking comes in. You know, you Google Ads,
display adds, local radio, like all these things can stacked
up without too much dollar spend, and then and then you
can start to get some real residents talk about the
risk though, so a lot of people they're like, well,
I don't have that much money. I've got this person
barking in my ear saying, if I spend more money
(33:09):
on Google Ads, then I'll make more money. Like what
words of caution would give somebody who's hearing a message
of kind of a single channel approach.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Well, when you're I mean, first of all, you'd hope
that the brand, I mean, this is one of the
benefits of joining a franchise brand is you're hoping you're
going to get walk into a scenario where that brand
has already all these other franchisees before you have ran campaigns.
You know, there's certain agencies that have gotten results, certain
agencies that haven't are out of the way, right, I mean,
(33:39):
so you're hope, hopeful that that agency is going to
hand you off agencies that have a campaign or campaigns
that produce and so always you know, trust but verify
that that's the case. So I would always start there
when you're starting a you know, in a lot of cases,
you don't really have a choice but to start there,
because if you're going to go pull somebody on your own,
(33:59):
that's when you really have a lot more things to
worry about. So I would start there, but I wouldn't
hesitate to ask them what other franchisees you're working with? Okay,
and then say I'm going to talk to that franchise ee.
And then you call them and say how long did
it take for those to work? You know, how much
money did you spend it? Do? I just keep holding
the fort and you keep spending the money. Because what
(34:21):
happens is is, like you mentioned Google Ads, is even
when there's a proven campaign that's out there, and I've
managed hundreds of Google Ads accounts, it's not what we do,
but I've had lots of experience in it, so I
have a lot of pain that I've experienced as well.
Is you launch a proven campaign that already has the
right keywords, the right messaging, the right landing page, everything's
(34:42):
already figured out. You launch it in a new market
and it doesn't work as well as it works in
other markets, And it comes down to you know, and
I find myself talking to the franchise. You going, hey,
you have one review, I need twenty reviews and then
this seems gonna work better. And it's true. So like
part of it is you have to like let things
you know develop for it to be performance. So it
(35:03):
doesn't mean you walk away from it, you know, but
it means that you need to consider that this is
gonna take one, two, in some cases three months for
that campaign to actually develop itself into a place that
is productive. And so you have to gat some patience,
which is hard because you're just starting. You're all excited,
you have all your shiny new trucks, and you're waiting
(35:24):
for the leads and you just sit there and know
nothing's happening, and you think the Google Ads agency is
incompetent and they're like, no, I need more time. You know, Google,
Google doesn't trust you. I mean even the Google Ads
they want to take your money. But if there's already
twenty businesses in your market giving them money to run ads,
they're gonna take the real the burden of hand, and
the burden in the hand is proven campaigns that are working.
(35:44):
You're the new guy in the equation and so you
still have to earn yourself up in the rankings of ads.
Even if you're willing to give them all the money,
they're not going to give you that Premie replacement. They're
gonna spend you, put you into places that they can
make money off of you, but it's not going to
produce for you. And so you have to kind of
earn that trust in Google's eyes. So there's even a
timely factor when it comes to Google Ads, and people
(36:07):
don't know that. People just think I put mad out there,
it's not working. The agency, the campaign is not good.
Fire them, and then they move on and now they
have to start all over again, right, so you know,
partly when it comes to that risk is people walking
away too soon, not letting a campaign develop. But you
shouldn't even start this without validation that other franchises are
(36:27):
having success. Don't just take the agency's word for it.
Call them they're part of your circle. You're buying into
a brand for the intellectual capital of the brand that
comes from the brand, but it's also your peers. Take
advantage of that. There's people have lots of experience that
are gonna be able to tell you what's working for them,
how long it took, how much money they spent before
(36:47):
it started working. Get all that information so your expectations
are proper, and then go down the path. Right it could.
And I don't know what the best channel is, but
I would always start with even though I'm telling you
earlier stacking in flu this is the thing. The reality is,
I would still hone in on one channel and get
it working before you go you start going too wide.
But just be aware of the other things you need
(37:09):
to be doing that's related to that one channel as
far as that influence is concerned, and it all will
factor in. But anyway, I'm not sure if I answered
your question, Dave, But somewhere in there there's nowhere.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And there's a lot of good insights. Yeah, well you
said something, and I know you know you and I
need to wrap up here in a few minutes. But
but you said something that almost feels contradictory. So I
want to explore that for a second. You say the
words a number of times like, hey, you got to
be patient, you gotta get this this thing you work,
you gotta let it work. And yet there's the flip
side of that, which is, but you got to verify,
you gotta verify, So what's your guidance, like, how should
(37:42):
how should franchise ors who are partnering with marketing partners,
and how should franchise owners who are partnering with marketing partners?
How should they balance it to? What kind of metrics
should they be using to govern the process? Because at
the end of the day, the data is what what
tells them whether or not it's working. How should they
be trusting and yet verifying all the same time.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Well, I mean a franchise brand first and foremost, they
have the advantage of seeing all the data, right, they
see this if they if you have one agency that
you have doing Google Ads for all the franchise ease,
you get this advantage of seeing And I've I've had
this view, right, I've have had three hundred Google Ads
campaigns going on at once and forty or fifty for
(38:23):
each brand, and like I've seen the same campaign have
completely varying degrees of results. And so that information is
there and the brand should have access to it. The
problem with a lot of the brands and the marketing teams,
they're going one hundred miles an hour. You know, you
get to like say, hey, if I was a franchise
you know, can you share with me past results like
(38:45):
the last six months of this campaign and things so
like it's it's KPIs are one thing. I mean, I
can really get in the nuance of things if you
looking at on the KPI level. But I don't think
that's what we need to talk about here today. But
you you, the brand should have something. They should have
something for you even if they you know, if they don't,
it's a disservice to their whole system. Because if I
(39:06):
was a franchise ee, I trust the brand. I'm you know,
I would, That's what I paid for, right, And so
I'm hoping that they're they're recommending agencies and campaigns that
are working. But if they are, that means there's data
that that came from. They're not just going, yeah, you know,
Lonnie's a good guy. You know you work with him,
like they're they're believe me, every brand I have, I
(39:28):
have dashboards of data that aggregates all those franchisees and
it also shows each franchise individually. And if the marketing
team is able to have that, at the very least,
they can look at that in five minutes and then
pass on to the new franchise z what they can expect, right,
and so that should be the first place I would
turn to. But if I was a franchise ee, I
(39:50):
would take that and accept that. But I also would
ask some franchise's that I know are are still using
that agency or that campaign, and maybe some that aren't,
maybe they quit too soon or not. So you still
want to take everything the grain of salt. But I
know Google ads works, I know Facebook Ads works, I
know every channel you mentioned, tiktoks, all those things work
(40:13):
at different capacities. The question is is that they have
enough time to develop the strategy that works, you know.
And so sometimes an agency will get a bad rap
or a campaign gets kicked out. It's usually because it
wasn't it didn't have time to get developed. And so anyway,
like somewhere somewhere along the lines, as a franchise ee,
(40:34):
you need to look out for yourself and your budget,
but trust the brand, ask franchisees and then have an expectation,
you know, ask the agency themselves what is the expectation here? When?
What does a success look like? How long do you
think you know a lot? We're going to like screw
it around that conversation and be like, well maybe in
(40:55):
thirty days or but like, you know, take it all,
all those three pillars of information that you're getting from
the from other franchise. He's an agency, will help you
determine whether it's something you want to pursue. But when
you commit to it, please give them ninety days at least.
And I would really give any campaign six months before
I say, hey, let's just be real here, this isn't working.
(41:17):
And you know, nobody wants to wait that long or
spend the money to get through that point. But I
think it's if you've done the first three things I
mentioned as far as validation, you should at least give
it that amount of time before you give up on it.
See it through at that point.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
And maybe maybe the next time we get together we
talk about marketing metrics, right, because there are key things.
You know, there are key things that to be looking at,
but they have to wait. Right. You can't say, oh,
I'm going to have massive volumes of visitors on my
website when I just launched the website as a new franchise.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah, that's thing.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
But you're brilliant, Like validation happens in the buying process.
Validation should continue to happen throughout the rest of the
time you run your business. You want to change marketing partners, excellent,
you better have four or five people who who shared
the same feedback you that it was a game change
or it brought them from point A to point C
and they're really grateful they did it. If you can't
(42:08):
get that, then you need to make sure you're being
cautious with your spend. Sometimes the knee jerk reaction just
to pull the plug on a marketing partner because you're
bug you're not getting the results you want. It might
be there because your spend isn't right, or your focus
isn't right, or they're doing something wrong. But if if
you're sixty days in and you're expecting results that are unlikely,
then it doesn't matter who you work with, you're gonna
(42:29):
be pulling the plug and then taking a sixty day
trip back in time and then starting over. So I'm
with you, and I agree.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
Well, it's I mean, it's worse when you go and pulling.
At least when you trust a preferred marketing agency that
a brand brings you, there's probably a campaign that they
piloted or they've ran already for a while, so there's
there's that advantage. They've already figured the things that don't
work out to an extent, right depending on the agency.
But if you then quit them and then you go
(42:58):
look in your backyard and you try to find somebody locally,
you're starting from zero. Like at least with the franchise
marketing agency, you've pat your you know, your months of
data and strategy has been developed. Whereas when you start
from zero, it's it's gonna be even longer unless the
person just gets lucky or hits a home run, you know,
which is partially experience but partially luck, I'm telling you.
(43:22):
Then you know, you run the risk of it going
another ninety days of nothing, and then it's that person
needs even more time to develop it. So I'd be
reluctant to turn to my backyard. You know, if you're
going to move away from an agency that the brand recommends,
like find somebody in your niche you know that focuses
on the industries that you're in. Look for agencies that
just specialize in them. At least on the paid ads side,
(43:44):
they're more likely to get have a campaign that's proven
because they've used the same campaigns and all their clients,
and they'll probably queue that up and have some level
of success with you. But don't, don't just get your
nephew to turn Facebook ads on. Please don't.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
It's audience look alike, audience. Here's the power of that,
right in both Google ads and Facebook ads and meta ads.
We'll talk about those two for two seconds. Like the
most the most powerful people that can have the most
impact on your success to the people who are already
doing it with either your peers, your your your like
local franchise owners across a big area you know, nationwide perhaps,
(44:21):
or somebody who's, like you said, an industry expert. And
I've got I've got a bunch of partners I work
with it that do ads, right, that's what they focus on.
One of them only does meta ads, and they crush
it because they only do meta ads, and they'll like
own a category like roofing and they so now because
they do that, they're working with four hundred different locations
that are doing roofing. And they've told me before, like
(44:43):
man Dave, like this, we had this idea, we tried
it in this market and it was a home run
home run, and so we lifted the concept, we applied
it to four hundred other locations, and now I've got
four hundred home runs happening. But we figured out that
worked because we saw the metric spike and then realize
what we've done, and then we replicated the strategy, like
that's somebody you want in your freaking corner, and somebody
(45:05):
who owns SEO you want in your corner. So like
you need to find these people that are functional experts.
And you've told this to me many times before, but
it's really hard to find a single stop shop where
they're a fantastic resource and SEO and a fantastic resource
in paid Google and a fantastic resource and resources and
paid Facebook. Like usually that doesn't exist in the same
(45:26):
in the same group. So just be really really cautious
about about people who make too many promises that are
too broad an omnichannel. You need omni channel strategies, but
it's not often with one group of people, right.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
I mean, you can depends on what industry you're in.
I mean, if you're in a competitive space like roofing
or water damage restoration or dental implants or something that's
a higher competitive scale. You know, if the only way
you're gonna win is by having the best, it's the
only way. It's not just you're thrown at up there
and it's gonna work. You know, you need the best
Facebook Ads guy, the best the best Google as guy,
(46:02):
and the best SEO guy. Otherwise, you know, and I
hate to say it, but like a lot of these
other agencies will be good at one of those things,
then they do the other things as a service to
the brand, but then they're not the best at it,
and they're good at one thing and not good at
other things. So you know that that's pretty much why
I focus on SEO. I mean, I have enough experience
(46:22):
with Google Ads to probably offer that as a service.
But the last thing I want to do is take
somebody's money that I'm not the best at delivering a
result on and I could great it can I can
deliver a minimal result you may not even know the difference,
and a lot of people will accept that. But I
just can't sleep at night doing that. So I'm either
going to go all in, lean into something heavily, and
(46:43):
know that I'm doing everything I can to maximize the
result and the only thing I had to have my
twenty thousand hours of SEO. I have almost ten thousand
hours of Google Ads, but I'm here telling you I
will not do Google ads for anybody because I'm still
not the best at it, you know, And that's kind
of where that mindset carries through to the results, you know,
(47:03):
and anyway to point, I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
I'm with you on that one, guys. You know, first,
thanks Lonnie, everyone listening. I hope that you've pulled several
nuggets out of this, including like why you need to
have a stacked marketing strategy, how you can do it,
what are some elements, what's the sequence you should maybe
do some of these things, and why you got to
work with functional experts. Like I'm just thinking about all
the insights that I'm pulling from this and the notes
I'm taking, and and uh, you know, I'm sure at
(47:29):
some point we'll have to have you back to maybe
do a part two on this one. But thanks so
much for sharing all those insights with us, Lonnie.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
All right, thanks for having me, And you know, I
can jump on here anytime and just talk talk talk,
so you know, don't hesitate to ask. Of course, thanks,
thanks for having me
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