Gold Nuggets
- Steve didn’t ask Juliet how she was today. She’s having a hard day today, and she wants to be at the fireplace with a glass of wine and the dog lying next to her.
- “Do you know why people think email marketing doesn’t work? One reason is, they are terrible at copywriting. The other is the corporate side of marketing.”
- “This is the ultimate secret to email marketing: You ask people if they want you to send them a thing, and if they say yes, you send them that thing and you don’t send them other stuff.”
- “Almost always, the best idea is the simplest idea.”
- “If you’re selling anything, or you’re any kind of marketing organization, or a non-profit, and you need people you need to reach, you need a list.”
- “If you’re going to start out with a list, the first thing you need to do is you need to have an email marketing provider who’s going to send those emails for you.”
- “90% will never purchase anything from you. But you’ve got to be okay with helping people for free.”
- “A lot of people who write articles about marketing online – their goal is not to teach you how to do marketing. Their goal is to get more readers, so they get paid more by whoever the platform is. They have tools that tell them which topics and articles are popular, and they will read those articles and summarize them in their own article having never done any of that marketing.”
- “No one’s giving away the secret sauce on the internet for free.”
- “Put a little notepad next to your phone, and every time somebody calls you and they enquire about making a purchase, put a checkmark for where they heard about you. If there are lots of checkmarks in the Facebook column, post more on Facebook.”
- “Join a business networking or business referral group. That’s going to be a good stepping-off point.”
- “If you’re having a bad business day, sit somewhere comfortable and quiet, preferably dark, for a few minutes and just let your mind wander, and then you’ll come up with a solution for a problem you’ve had in the past. If you’re motivated, you’re not going to want to sit in that chair anymore, you’re going to want to go do something about what you just thought of.”
- “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.” – Unknown
Meet Matt Rouse
Our guest is Matt Rouse, co-founder of Hook SEO, LLC.
Matt is the author of Crush SEO, Start Saying Yes, and Flattening the Hamster Wheel. He has also authored over 1000 articles and many training courses, including the Inbox Mastery Email Marketing Masterclass. Matt hosts the Digital Marketing Masters Podcast and has done over 150 episodes.
Smart Man, Smarter Woman References
We talk about a lot in each episode; however, we don’t want you to miss a thing! Here are some key items were mentioned if you want to take a closer look.
Website Recommendations:
matthewrouse.com
hookseo.com
Book Recommendation:
Tribes by Seth Godin
Talk Triggers by Daniel Lemin and Jay Baer
Stay Connected:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hookseo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dmmpodcast/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattmrouse/
Learn more about our Cloud Accounting Services here
Transcript
Steve Loates (00:00):
Welcome everyone to another episode of The Podcast, Smart Man, Smarter Woman, a podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And thank you very much for giving us a listen today. I am Steve Loates.
Juliet Aurora (00:15):
And I am Juliet Aurora.
Steve Loates (00:16):
And we are your co-hosts. And before we get started today, Juliet, what would you like to say for yourself being the smarter woman of this pair?
Juliet Aurora (00:26):
Oh, so you flipped it around. You didn’t ask me how I was, which is what you always do and I had my answer prepared. So you’re-
Steve Loates (00:33):
After I got that lecture last time, I said I better come up with something different.
Juliet Aurora (00:38):
Well actually, interestingly enough, my answer and my response has always been, when you asked me how I am, I always say I’m fabulous. Everything’s awesome. And I’m having a really tough day today. It’s one of those days and everybody has it. Entrepreneurs especially, I’m sure have it where you just don’t feel like doing anything. You just want to sit in front of the fireplace. Have your dog next to you. Maybe have a glass of wine even though it’s middle of the afternoon and read a book. And not do anything. I know it’s kind of the day I’m having but the show must go on. And so we’re here and let’s get started.
Steve Loates (01:14):
Absolutely. And just for the record, I didn’t take any offense there that it was the dog you wanted lane and not me. So we’ll just move right past that. And in fact, I may even edit that out of the show.
Juliet Aurora (01:27):
I get that.
Steve Loates (01:29):
So anyways, thank you and I’m sorry to hear you’re not having an awesome day. But it will get better I promise. So anyway, today we have a great guest with us from the East Coast of Canada, Nova Scotia, joining us. And he actually just moved there and he moved there in the middle of a lot of this craziness that’s been going on and we may touch on that, but I would like to welcome to the show, Matt Rouse, and thanks for joining us, Matt.
Matt Rouse (01:58):
Thank you Steven and Juliet for having me on the show, I’m excited I’m going to improve your day. Your day’s going to get better immediately. I know an excellent trick for that too, if you want to ask me that later.
Juliet Aurora (02:13):
Or do you want to pop it out? You don’t want to like tease it for the end of the show kind of thing? Actually you know what? I have a quick funny story about that. I was recording a podcast yesterday, because I have my own podcast also. Right? And somebody brought up the name of this book and it’s called “Astrological Love”. It’s this book that was written in the 70s. And the reason that this book is famous in the marketing world, is that somebody bought the rights to the book, renamed it and then they marketed this book and they sold millions of copies when the original sold like a few hundred. So the idea was, I’m going to go look up the name of the book and before we get to the end of the show, everybody stay. And then I’ll tell you the name of the book before we get to the end. And then I couldn’t find the name of the book and then we forgot about it and never said it.
Steve Loates (02:59):
There you go. I’ve done the same thing. Although I guess the best thing I’ve done, Matt, and I don’t know if you’ve done this in your many episodes with your own podcast is, we’ve done a podcast where I forgot to hit the record button. Now thankfully, it was very early on in our podcast history and the guests was very understanding of my snafu if you will. But I haven’t done it since though. I’ve only done it that once. So we’re all good. Anyway Matt, your background is digital marketing and why don’t we start off, maybe tell us a little bit about your own entrepreneurial journey. How you got to where you are. And what you do. And how exactly you help entrepreneurs out there.
Matt Rouse (03:50):
Sure. So I’m a host of the Digital Marketing Masters Podcast as well as I run my own agency. It’s Hook SEO Digital Marketing that we help small business owners and kind of direct to consumer brands. And I originally started. I was a support person for a company that you guys will know in Canada that was shock communications. I was actually tech support person for them and I kind of worked my way up through the ranks. I did some web design work for them.
Matt Rouse (04:19):
And then I also started supporting the nonprofits and educational institutions. So like your schools and stuff like that for high speed internet when it was just starting out in the late 90s. And I really liked… It was a good company and everything but I kind of got into a disagreement with one of my managers at the time. And I said, “look, I found this way to save the company a ton of money. Like tens of thousands of dollars a month.” I said I want this tiny raise and they didn’t give me the raise and it’s not Shaw’s fault. It was some middle manager person. Made that decision. But I was just like, well, you know what, I’m going to go apply for a job in the United States because I hear lots of people are moving to the United States from Canada to get work.
Matt Rouse (05:05):
And then two days later, I had already had two interviews and I’d been hired by a contract company to go work for Intel for five and a half times what I was making. So 12 days later I was gone. And I stayed in the United States for almost 20 years. And during that time as a contractor, I ran my side business doing various marketing and SEO tasks and building websites and stuff like that.
Matt Rouse (05:33):
And then I started doing it full time, about 2008. And then my current business partner and I had done a bunch of work together. He had a payment processing company. Then even in all day I heard that his customers wanted e-commerce and I knew how to do websites. Then we started doing advertising and eventually we just merged our companies in 2014. And that’s the company we have today. So just like a lot of people were accidental entrepreneurs, right? We’re just doing it as a side business. Doing some stuff here and there and then you learn how to do more things. People ask you to do more work and you learn how to get the systems in place. And then you got to learn how to run a business and all the things that come along with that and hire staff.
Matt Rouse (06:18):
And now we have a digital agency with people in three countries and close to about 10 staff and contractors. Yeah. And probably about close to 100 clients. So we’re a reasonable sized agency I would say. We’re not huge but it’s been great. And you know what, the biggest thing that drives us is, we decided early on that the mission of our business and it wasn’t like officially written down as like, “this is our mission statement”, but our mission was, we wanted to help our customer’s customers.
Matt Rouse (06:57):
Because we were so annoyed by all the problems that you get in digital marketing related things or websites and bad UI. And terrible marketing and spam emails and all these things that go out to customers sent by agencies. So we wanted to help that small business owner be able to both in a moral and just way, but also an honest way to lead generation. Build things that had nice interfaces and do marketing that wasn’t cheap, like the old spammy direct marketing approach. And we still do that today. The first thing I think about is if I’m going to write an ad, I go, who’s my customer’s customer. Right?
Steve Loates (07:48):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Juliet Aurora (07:49):
Well, it’s, it’s interesting how much email marketing has been around for a while now. It’s evolved certainly. And then with the anti-spam and privacy laws and everything, it’s evolved again. And so you hear a lot of business owners talk about, email marketing doesn’t work. That nobody reads their email anymore, but there’s still so many people that are doing it. So it obviously is working. So can you kind of dispel that myth that email marketing no longer works?
Matt Rouse (08:20):
Absolutely. You know, what happened? You know why people think email marketing doesn’t work? There’s a couple of reasons. One reason is, they are terrible at copywriting. So they’re sending emails and nobody cares about generally. And you could tell right away. Here’s the email you’ll get, it’ll be like, “Hi.”, First name. So, “Hi Steve or Juliet.” And then it’s going to be like, “Widgets 30% off. Get them now. This price goes up Friday.” And that’s every single email they sell you. It’s percent off coupon or buy one get one. And that’s the only thing you get over and over. If that’s the only thing that you want for that company, that’s fine. But it’s not really a way that you’re going to build a relationship with someone. And the other is kind of the corporate side of email marketing.
Matt Rouse (09:09):
And that is the CEO or the CMO says, “Hey everybody, we need to get a newsletter that goes out to our customers. And we haven’t been doing it consistently, so we’re going to get this.” And so they put someone in charge of it and that person goes, well, I don’t know what to put in the newsletter. So they go to each department head and say, “I need you to put something in our newsletter for our customers.” I mean, you got somebody from engineering who has a written anything since college trying to put an article together. And you got somebody from accounting who shouldn’t even be in there.
Matt Rouse (09:39):
And then you get this conglomerate of crap that nobody wants to read. None of the people writing it actually want to write it. And everybody’s got a deadline. So they’re just trying to get things done at the last second. And you just get this thing, that’s just a mess, where you get these… I call it the nobody cares email. You got the email from the company and every single thing that’s in it, you couldn’t care less about. They’re not thinking about, “who’s reading this.” And the secret of email marketing is super. This is the ultimate secret of email marketing. If you’re listening, you can write this down because this is the ultimate secret to email marketing.
Juliet Aurora (10:21):
And he gets to hear it here on Smart Man, Smarter Woman. The ultimate secret to email marketing. Okay, we’re ready.
Matt Rouse (10:28):
Keep this to the bag. Okay. You ask people If they want you to send them a thing. And if they say yes, you send them that thing and you don’t send them other stuff. That’s it. You signed up for a reason. You went to… They had some kind of lead magnet or something which is, “Sign up to get my five tips on how to fix your medical billing.” And so you sign up to get the tips about medical billing that’s thing in the United States but not so much Canada. So you sign up for this thing and then they send you 30% off widgets.
Matt Rouse (11:05):
And you’re like, I don’t care about that. You send them the tips on that. And then you send them other things that would interest someone who’s in the medical billing field. You don’t send them other stuff. And you don’t sell, sell, sell and all that kind of stuff. And the best thing to send somebody is to say, “How can I help you?” This is probably the most business that companies generate in this when they’re starting out with email marketing. If they haven’t… Maybe they’ve collected emails for a long time, haven’t used their list for a while. Or they have a big customer base that they’re going to send to.
Matt Rouse (11:42):
All you got to do is send them an email and say, “Hey, this is Matt from Hook SEO. I just want to ask you one simple question. How can I help you grow your business? Thanks. Matt.” Send. I don’t need to put a photo in it. I don’t need to put a button in it. I don’t need to get a template. I don’t need to get a graphic in design out and Photoshop some stuff and take some photos and get a photo shoot put together and all… No. Just, “How can I help you?” That is one of the easiest ways to get started. And you would be amazed. People will be like, “Hey, I have this problem.” And you’re going to be like, “Hey, I have this solution for this problem.” And this is how much it costs. Is that in your budget. And now you’ve just made a sale.
Juliet Aurora (12:24):
Great idea. Very simple and as you said, most times when you get the emails or you’re preparing the email and you’re thinking, I need to do all the stuff. That I have to make it look pretty. And I have to format it. And I need to have all these visual graphics and everything. And sometimes simple is the way to go.
Matt Rouse (12:46):
Yeah. So I’ll tell you that the last email I sent, which of course is going to be different by the time this gets released. But the last email I sent to my list was called “Roger Ebert Hates my Favorite Movie”. And you’re like, what does this have to do with marketing? And the idea behind it is that the movie was not made for him. And that movie is “Fight Club” by the way. I know that’s a weird choice, but I really loved the movie because it’s kind of this counterculture movie about fighting against consumerism, which you think would be a weird thing for a marketing guy.
Matt Rouse (13:19):
But anyways, the movie was definitely not made for an audience made up of people similar to Roger Ebert. And that’s why he hates that movie. However, there was other people who just love that movie. Because it was made for them. And so the thing that I talked about was, when you’re planning your content or your product releases, whether that’s an email or a SAS product or anything like that, any kind of marketing campaign, who is the audience? And don’t worry about everyone else. A lot of people go, “well, Oh some people really aren’t going to like this thing I’m sending.”
Matt Rouse (13:57):
Well, who cares about those people? They’re not your people. They’re never going to buy anything from me anyway. So focus on the people who are in your tribe. You just like, that book tribes that was “Fly”, Seth Godin. Who incidentally is one of the first, if not the first, email marketing person that ever made an email marketing company. He sent some of the first email marketing emails that were ever sent. And then his book and his Ted talk is 20 years ago now is permission marketing. And in the last 20 years, every company almost in the world has thrown that permission out the window and sent people a bunch of garbage they didn’t ask for.
Juliet Aurora (14:43):
Yeah. No, it’s true. It’s funny how almost always the best idea is the simplest idea. And I’ve always viewed email marketing no different than any other kind of marketing in that you’re trying to develop a relationship when… You’re trying to build some trust. You’re trying to get them to look forward to the thing that you’re sending them. Because each time you do, there was some value in what you sent them. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, the minute you start getting things from people that you did not ask for, is the minute I’m looking for, “where is that unsubscribed button?” Because I don’t want anything else from these people.
Matt Rouse (15:39):
And even worse, they hide the unsubscribed button. So you give up and you just delete it and then they send you something else next week. And they’re just teaching you to hate them. It’s just the worst thing. And not only that, they’re paying for it. Because you pay by the number of subscribers you have on your email platform. So if you have 10,000 people in a big list for like a large company, you got 10,000 people in your list but 1,000 of them don’t like you. Your email plan would probably be 50 bucks a month cheaper if you didn’t have those people on the list. The only reason they’re on the list is because you didn’t let them unsubscribe.
Juliet Aurora (16:18):
So let’s start at the beginning for our audience, for those people who aren’t doing any email marketing or aren’t doing any formal email marketing. I’m sure that, them like us have always heard, “we need a list.” And you’ve talked about, when you send it to your list. So maybe this starting point is, do you need a list? How big does that list need to be? And how do you build it?
Matt Rouse (16:44):
100% you should have a list. If you’re selling anything or you’re any kind of marketing organization or a nonprofit, people that you need to reach or that you need to talk to. You need a list. And there’s no questioning whether or not you need a list. There is somebody out there who’s going to argue with me and say, “Well, this company built $300,000 of revenue without a list.” I’m like, “yeah. But every other company in the world didn’t.” So if you’re going to start out with a list, the first thing that you need to do is, you need to have an email provider, like an email marketing provider who is going to send those emails for you. You don’t want to be sending it out of your Gmail or out of your Outlook or whatever. I mean, that might be fine when you have five people on your list, but if you’re going to have any amount of people, you might as well use them because they’re free, usually up to a certain number of subscribers.
Matt Rouse (17:35):
And here’s where people go wrong. They go wrong right on step one. They haven’t even got a person on their list yet and people mess up. And what happens is, they just randomly pick a program to use for their email marketing. So they either just pick the one that they’ve heard of. Pick the last one that they heard of or they saw an ad for. Or they go, “I used to work at XYZ company and they used Mailchimp. So I’m going to use Mailchimp.” And different email marketing programs are good at different things. So If, let’s say you have an e-commerce company and you’re selling e-commerce out of your store and you’re sending people… Your website sends people receipts and stuff like that but you also want to do email marketing. Then you should be looking at something like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. And Klaviyo is like an automation email marketing system. It’s fairly complicated. It’s pretty in-depth and it’s not cheap. But Mailchimp does some of that type of automation also for cheap.
Matt Rouse (18:46):
The problem with Mailchimp is when you get into a lot of subscribers, it gets pretty expensive pretty fast. And that’s in their business model. So they want you to get on there for free, kind of get it all built out. And then the cost of switching is too high. So you just pay the extra money. If you’re just sending emails like text based emails, maybe you’re going to put a button or a photo in it kind of thing and the rest of it’s just text, which that’s a format I highly recommend for most small businesses and coaches, then you could look at something like SendFox and SendFox is free to start. And I think we bought the lifetime membership. I think it was $69 for life. So, and that’s like 10,000 emails a month or something you can send. So it’s super inexpensive. It’s not a monthly. It’s not coming off your monthly revenue and it’s super easy to use. And it has a fantastic feature in it that you just click a button to send only to active subscribers.
Matt Rouse (19:47):
So if you have a list, say of, build up your list a bit, you get a few hundred people on there, and you have something that you think only the people who are kind of really into it are going to understand or are going to like it, you could just click that button. And it only sends it to people who regularly open your emails. And you can check that on or off. So it’s super easy. It’s also built by AppSumo. So it was a big company. They’re going to be around forever. So you don’t have to really worry about them going anywhere. I’m honestly not a big fan of Constant Contact. I’ve used it, they’ve improved it quite a bit recently but just there’s just some features that are missing there that you could get in another program for cheaper.
Steve Loates (20:28):
And what do you recommend is the best way to start building your list? You want to do some email marketing and you have zero list.
Matt Rouse (20:38):
Sure. So it’s going to depend a little bit on the type of business that you have. And so actually one more email tool that is not necessarily an email tool is called Kajabi and Kajabi is a course platform, but it has the email marketing tool built into it. So if you want to say you’re a coach or maybe some kind of a trainer or something, or education institution, where you’re going to be selling digital products like courses or downloads or PDF, something like that, then it has the landing page system is built into it. And the course delivery system is built into it. And the email marketing system is built into it. And they’re all pretty robust but it’s a little more expensive. But it’s not expensive if you were going to buy all those tools separately. So like we have an email marketing course called the Inbox Mastery.
Matt Rouse (21:38):
And we use Kajabi for that. We could build our own. We know how, we have the staff to do it, but I like having everything contained in one spot. And so when I had mentioned the word lead magnet a couple times. A lead magnet is where you have something that you’re going to give to someone in exchange for them signing up to your list. That’s what a lead magnet is. And most people will be familiar with that now. That’s when… So a good example would be, I have a lead magnet that is a PDF that teaches people how to promote their blog posts better. So they give me their name and their email. I send them… Email them out this PDF that shows them how to promote their blogs. And then that puts them on my list.
Juliet Aurora (22:24):
And so should your lead magnet… I would assume the answer is yes, but let’s ask the experts. Should your lead magnet be tied to your service or a product that you’re selling or should it just be something generic that your audience would be interested in?
Matt Rouse (22:45):
I think you want it to be tied in. It doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to a product that you sell, but it should be tied up to the result that your client is looking for. So in our example, we have an Inbox Mastery course to teach people email marketing. But then we have, right now, I think we have 10 lead magnet set up for that. And one of them is how to promote your blog. One of them is how to come up with marketing ideas and then score those ideas to see which is going to be the most effective. One is a copy of my latest book for free that you can just download a PDF copy. And then we have a bunch more, but all of them are related to business growth. How can I grow my business? So that’s kind of our overall theme to it and all of our lead magnets deal with that theme.
Juliet Aurora (23:37):
But it’s, how do I grow my business related to marketing? That’s not, how do I grow my business by growing my team or getting my finances in order. It’s, you’re a marketing agency so all your lead magnets, you’re obviously trying to attract clients who want to grow their business. And so you want to share knowledge, how to grow your business through marketing.
Matt Rouse (24:03):
Right. Now you could have… If you have a lead magnet that say how to fix your HR department or something like that. That is maybe a problem where they don’t need to grow their business more. Their problem is that they’re having internal issues cause of growth. That’s not going to be somebody who’s going to be a customer of mine later. You’re always going to have a little bit of crossover. You’re always going to get people to download your stuff and never buy anything. The majority will never buy anything. 90 something percent will never purchase anything from you, but you got to be okay with helping people for free. And most of the… Your podcast, how much do people pay for your podcasts? So-
Steve Loates (24:45):
Yeah. No, for sure. What would you say in your experience, what are a couple of the biggest mistakes you see small businesses make when it comes to their digital marketing. Things that they really should try to avoid?
Matt Rouse (25:05):
Well, this one you may have heard before, but it’s shiny object syndrome. Every time they read an article, they go start working on whatever that thing is. They never finish it. And they read an article about something new and they’re on 27 social media platforms that they never update anymore. And that’s a problem. And another one is kind of almost the opposite of that, which is sticking to one thing, like almost religiously without continuing to monitor the benefit of that. And a good example of that is small businesses when COVID hit. All these businesses had to shut down or they had to go, like restaurants had to go to take out only.
Matt Rouse (25:48):
In some places, there was people to shelter at home orders. So they had no customers. So they all went on Facebook and they all started posted on their Facebook pages. Not realizing that when they started their Facebook page eight, 10 years ago, their organic reach was 100% meaning if they posted something, every person who liked their page would see it. Not knowing that now it’s about 0.01%. So only one out of 10,000 people are going to see it. That is a complete waste of time now for your business.
Matt Rouse (26:21):
Unless you’ve got something super engaging and people are going to share it. it’s not worth the effort anymore, but you still see businesses there like, “Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 AM I post.” Because somebody six years ago wrote an article that that’s the best time to post. Or, “Every Tuesday at two is what I send my email.” Well no, that’s not the best time. That’s the best time somebody six years ago heard from somebody else that they wrote an article about. And that also brings me to one other problem. And this is kind of a pet peeve, so I’m going to bring it up. Okay.
Juliet Aurora (26:55):
Okay. We’re ready.
Matt Rouse (26:56):
A lot of people who write articles about marketing online, their goal is not to teach you how to do marketing. Their goal is to get more readers so they get paid more by medium or whoever the platform is. Their goal is more visitors, not to improve your marketing. So what they do is they look. They have tools that tell them which topics are popular and which articles are popular. And they will go read those articles and summarizes them in their own article. Having never done any of that marketing. They’ve never tried it. They’ve never tested it. They’ve never done any of the things that they’re talking about for the most part. And there’s a few examples. Maybe there’s… You could feel pretty safe when you read an article in like Forbes or Search Engine Journal or something like that. But for the most part, nobody’s giving away the secret sauce on the internet for free.
Matt Rouse (27:46):
Now you see it all the time. And then, people call me and they say, “Hey, what do you think I… I sell backhoes. Do you think I need a Tik TOK account?” Well, no, I don’t think you need one. I think you need to know how to use it if you’re going to be a marketing person. But if you’re a backhoe salesman, unless you could come up with a really good way to make it really popular, and it’s not going to be worth your effort, get on YouTube and get some videos about how to use your backhoe. And you’ll make millions of dollars instead of wasting your time.
Juliet Aurora (28:23):
So how do you as a business owner… Because there’s so many platforms that are out there now. 10 years ago there was one or there was two. And like you said, so many people would set up a Facebook page, a business page, and now it’s not worth it to post on it. So how do you as a business owner know where you should be? Can you determine that without an expert guiding you along the way?
Matt Rouse (28:50):
Well, I think an excellent way to do it is put a little note pad or something next to your phone. And every time somebody calls you and they’re inquiring about making a purchase or something like that for your business, you just put a little check mark for where they heard about you from. Ask him, “Where did you hear about us from?” They go, “Oh, I saw you on Google.” Or, “It was a Google ad.” Or, you get the odd person it might be like Bing or something. And then you’ll get… Somebody might say Facebook or whatever. And if there’s lots of check marks in the Facebook column, then postmark on Facebook. I mean, that’s a simple way to do it. If it’s online sales, then you have fairly good attribution. You’re going to be able to see what the referring links were to you.
Matt Rouse (29:30):
That’s still not 100%. I mean, no attribution is 100%. And that’s a whole nother conversation about the spam that’s in the online advertising world now and the false clicks and click farms and all this kind of stuff. The best thing to do is, just do your best to track it from the customer’s own words. “How did you hear about us?” And if they say, “It was a referral from Bob and you find out that 10 of your customers got referred from Bob, then go out and buy Bob a present and mail it to him with a thank you card. And that’d be way more effective. I get more referrals than posting three times a week on Facebook. Because Bob’s a fantastic referral partner.
Steve Loates (30:18):
Yeah. We need more Bobs. Every business needs more Bobs. For sure. And we do tend to ignore that, if I am a brand new business, I’m just starting up and let’s say I’m going to be in the B2B space. So I’m going to be selling to other businesses not to the consumer. What is the first thing I should look at to make good use of digital marketing for my business?
Matt Rouse (30:53):
Honestly, the first thing that I would do is join a business networking or business referral group. Which most of them are online right now. So it’s sort of counts digital marketing, but that’s going to be a good stepping off point. You’re going to get some people, some contacts. They’re going to know some people. Now you got some contacts and stuff. Then you can put a piece of content together. Like this is a white paper about how our product or service works or what our equipment does. And I’m going to maybe make a little video that shows how this solves the problem that your customer is going to have. And then you can go to your people at maybe your, I take the lead group or BNI group or whatever, your Chamber of Commerce, BBB, whatever it is you have.
Matt Rouse (31:39):
And you can say, “Hey, I’m looking for somebody who is interested in solving this problem. If you know someone like that, just let me know. And I’ll email them this link to this video that I have, that shows how it works.” And now you start getting people interested in your business. You can get a little bit of revenue in the door and once you got revenue, now you can look at maybe doing some advertising, maybe some direct advertising, because it’s quick return. I would always… Not to be self-serving, but I would always get an expert to do your advertising for you because man, there’s a lot of ways you can melt a credit card on Google or Facebook.
Steve Loates (32:18):
Yeah. Yeah, we-
Matt Rouse (32:20):
Especially if you’re paying by the size of the audience or by the reach. I saw a guy once, he spent $24,000 in three hours. No idea what he was doing and we actually ended up arguing with Google on the phone for weeks and I got his money back. But he could have spent that money advertising instead of arguing with Google to get his $24,000 back.
Steve Loates (32:45):
True. And then that’s great advice. That really is. Hire a professional. Certainly as soon as you are able with your business, hire a professional and in the long run, you will invest less money than if you lots of times tried to do it yourself. So I think that’s great advice. And that brings us to the part of the show called the Smart man, Smarter woman version of James Lipton’s Q and A from the actor’s studio where we ask every guest the same six questions. And are you ready?
Matt Rouse (33:27):
I’m ready.
Steve Loates (33:28):
Perfect. Question number one. What one word best defines an entrepreneur?
Matt Rouse (33:38):
Motivation.
Steve Loates (33:40):
Okay. What profession, other than your own, would you like to attend?
Matt Rouse (33:51):
Content creator. I guess that’s similar, but-
Steve Loates (33:55):
That’s okay. What profession would you like never to attempt?
Matt Rouse (34:03):
There’s a lot of those. I don’t think I would make a very good mechanic.
Steve Loates (34:10):
Okay. What sound or noise do you love?
Matt Rouse (34:16):
I love hearing my four year old laughing.
Steve Loates (34:19):
Okay. What book would you recommend every entrepreneur should read?
Matt Rouse (34:29):
Well, there’s a few, but my kind of recent favorite is “Talk Triggers” by Jay Baer.
Steve Loates (34:37):
Okay. That’s great. I’m a Jay Baer fan. When your own entrepreneurial journey is completed, what do you hope your legacy is?
Matt Rouse (34:49):
Well, I’ve written three books now for entrepreneurs and small business owners and I’m going to keep writing them until I can’t write anymore. So to have a nice library of books to help people.
Steve Loates (35:04):
Awesome. And before we end the show for this episode, for those listeners who would like to connect with you, Matt, what is the best way for them to do that?
Matt Rouse (35:15):
Easiest ways to find me on LinkedIn. It’s just, Matt Rouse, on LinkedIn, or you can find us on the podcast at Digital Marketing Masters. Anywhere you can hear this podcast, you can probably hear ours too.
Steve Loates (35:28):
Perfect. And the spelling of the last name folks is R-O-U-S-E If you’re looking him on LinkedIn. And do you have any final thoughts you would like to share with our audience, Matt?
Matt Rouse (35:45):
I do have a final thought because the set at the beginning, if you listened to the end, I would tell you the secret to get out of your funk if you’re in kind of having a bad business day. And the secret is to kind of do exactly what you said, except you don’t really need like a glass of wine or a drink or something or a book. What you need to do is just sit somewhere comfortable and quiet, preferably dark. And you just sit there for a few minutes and just let your mind wander. And then you’ll come up with an idea for something, a solution to some problem that you’ve had in the past or an idea for something new. And then if you’re… Like I said about being an entrepreneur is motivation. If you’re motivated, you’ll not to want to sit in that chair anymore in the dark. You want to go do something about what you just thought of. So that’s kind of sneaky trick to skip out of your motivation funk and get rolling again.
Steve Loates (36:43):
Perfect. So spend a little time with yourself.
Matt Rouse (36:47):
That’s right.
Steve Loates (36:47):
Awesome. And what about you Juliet, you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?
Juliet Aurora (36:53):
Sure. I mean, I think that that marketing is always this huge word that business owners don’t know what to do. How to do it. Where to start. And over the years, with all of the different platforms, it has just gotten more complex. It used to be that you either put a sign on the side of a bus or on a bus stop, or you took out an ad in the yellow pages of the newspaper. Maybe the radio. And that was pretty much the only options you had. And so I really appreciate Matt sharing some of the tips for people to get started and pointing them maybe in a direction that gives a little bit of help in navigating. Because it’s pretty chaotic out there right now. So thank you, Matt, for sharing your knowledge.
Steve Loates (37:43):
You’re welcome.
Juliet Aurora (37:43):
Yeah. And that brings us to this episode’s words of wisdom. And I love this quote, but I couldn’t find who said it originally, so I cannot give credit. So I won’t take credit. We’ll just say for now it’s unknown. So if anyone in the audience knows who said this, please let me know. So the quote is, “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t”.
Matt Rouse (38:24):
That’s absolutely true.
Steve Loates (38:28):
And that’s it. So thank you very much, Matt. Really appreciate it. Lots of great stuff there. So thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 4 (38:37):
Steve, Juliet. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Steve Loates (38:41):
Our pleasure. And thank you, Juliet, my awesome co-host. But most importantly, thank you to you, our audience, for tuning in, giving this a listen, sharing your time. We hope you found some value. And if you liked the podcast, please subscribe. We’re in all of the regular places, iTunes, Spotify, or you can go to the website, smartmansmarterwoman.com. So thank you again, until next time. Take good care of yourself and those that you love. Bye for now.
Song by Adam Vitovsky / CC BY 3.0
