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Allan is pleased to welcome award-winning speaker and digital marketing expert, Dan McGaw. In this episode, Dan and Allan discuss the importance of being consistent with different types of marketing strategies. Adding content and value to your company’s marketing plan is key to success.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Allan. I’m a family man and attorney and an entrepreneur. Each week, we provide resources and advice to help build your business. Are you ready? Then let’s go. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. today. I’m very excited for our guest. His name is Dan McGaw. He is an expert in digital marketing owns an agency. He’s big into martech. He’s an entrepreneur, he just knows a lot about business in general. And he knows a lot of things that can help your business. So welcome to the show. Dan, we’re glad to have you. Thanks so much for having me here. So what did I miss? I know that you’re you’re an entrepreneur at heart, you have the kind of this tech background, you have this marketing background. Tell us about yourself. What are the things that you’re passionate about?
One? Thanks for asking. Yeah, there’s definitely a lot. So I mean, I’ve been in the marketing game for over 20 years. So I got my start in 98, sending mass emails since before there was even mass email. So I’ve just seen some shit, right? I’ve been around for a long time. Some people recognize me for when I was the head of marketing at kissmetrics, one of the pioneers in analytics. So I’ve been around the block with a lot of different cool companies there. So but I mean, what I’m really passionate about right is trying to understand human psychology, trying to figure out how do we make people tick? How do we make people take the next action? And then how do we match that with your data, so leveraging human psychology and trying to understand them, and then looking at the behaviors that are doing an analytics, and then creating really, really cool marketing outcomes from that. That’s really where I get like, excited. And that’s how I got so baked into building martech stacks is because I really need all that data to really create those outcomes.
Yeah, marketing is different nowadays, where, you know, the more specific and the more niche you can get, you know, the better your results back in, in the olden days, whatever that means. When clicks weren’t as, as expensive and social media wasn’t so flooded, you could, you know, have a more shotgun approach, right? Like, you could just say, Hey, you know, I’m paying a few bucks a click. Now they’re, you know, in some industries, hundreds of 1000s of dollars a click, you have to kind of hone in on some of that data, right? Is that kind of what you’re getting at?
Yeah, for sure, you really have to hone in on that data. And you know, it, the cost per click is so expensive that our company won’t even pay for PPC, on most of the keywords, just because Mark tech marketing operations is just so hot that people are spending 100 $200. A click LIKE it gets out of control, because you’re competing against big companies like IBM and Oracle, right, like on these clicks. So especially in the analytic space, it’s absolutely absurd sometimes. So leveraging that data, you can find different ways to communicate different ways to target and attract those customers. And then as well as once you have them, really to be able to effectively communicate with them and be able to like target your messaging to the right profile at the right time.
So how does Mark tech affect small businesses?
Yeah, for sure, you know, I think martech in a small business is difficult, because like most small businesses are intimidated by technology in general, right, the businesses that are really able to take advantage of it one martech is going to help you automate your business and get you the hell out of the way, right. And that’s our biggest cost as a small business. I mean, I run to small businesses, myself, and all I’m trying to do is automate myself out of a job as much as I possibly can, right. And that’s what martech really going to enable you to do in your business. And that’s why we recommend people take it so seriously. And, you know, if you’re scared of the technology, hire somebody on Upwork, go to Fiverr, right, but you’ve got to automate your business, because your time you’re not going to get it back. And you need to make sure that you keep your time.
Where are you seeing that small businesses can add more automation create better systems? What are some specific functions of small businesses that you think are kind of missing the boat a little bit with those things?
A lot of it has to do really inside of the business’s operations, right. So whether this be responding back to customer orders, whether this be how the systems are going to communicate. So an order can make place from one place to another. A lot of that can really be automated. It’s the internal operations. Now kind of just use an example for us. Right. One of the things that we have a lot of automation banded together with is using a product called Zapier, right. So I have Got a book called build cool shit. And when you order that book from our website, right, there is no direct way to connect it to our fulfillment provider, right. However through using Zapier and our marketing automation tool, we’re able to connect all those things together. So when you order a book on my website, it winds up into the fulfillment center, and it’s all able to be taken care of. But that wasn’t just an out of the box thing. And most people think they need to get a developer. But using technologies like Zapier, I mean, you can connect Google calendar to Trello, and to slack and then back to QuickBooks. So there’s a lot of automation that you can really build into your business using tools like Zapier to do whatever is a redundant process. You know, every small business is so different that it can be really, really hard to blanket statement there. But a lot of it has to do with Hey, listen, this thing started over here. And I’ve got to manually put it over there, well, why don’t we build an automation to really make that happen. And that’s where tools like Zapier really come into play, and really help you kind of automate your business.
So I have a lot of, you know, owners, entrepreneurs of, of service based businesses, Home Services, plumbers, h back Pest Control companies, a lot of those types of entrepreneurs, listen to this show, what are ways that they can do a little better with with their automation, customer service, right? Because in the service business, face to face is a big deal, or person to person. And as they’re trying to figure out ways they can automate, how do they know what resources are available to them? How do they go out on the marketplace and start shopping for these types of resources?
Yeah, I definitely know the trade space pretty well, service Titan, who is like the CRM or a platform very familiar with service Titan, they’re a longtime client of ours. So we build their entire stack, so we do a lot of stuff with them. And then house call Pro is also a former client of ours, we built a lot of their infrastructure and stuff like that, or at least advise them on how to do it. So we definitely understand that, you know, I think when you’re thinking about trades, right, one of the things that’s easiest with the trades company is to try to go into one of the all in one platform that can really help you do as much as you can. Naturally, if you’re not technically inclined, it’s going to be a little hard to connect everything together, leveraging Zapier, workato, whatever the tool may be. So we really do recommend people use those cool platforms, whether it be a house call, or as service, Titan, those tools are gonna be really, really helpful. But the foundation really you have to choose some sort of marketing automation tool, which is going to enable you to accept a customer’s request be able to respond back to them saying, hey, thanks so much, we received your request. And then as that request has moved along the system, right, hey, this this was completed, having a survey email go out to that person or having a Hey, review us on Google or having any of those types of automations are going to be really, really helpful. And that’s where a lot of companies we see are using products like Active Campaign, HubSpot autopilot to make it. So they can try to automate some of those things that they would have to do in that customer journey, and really keep those things updated. Right. So the goal is to try to always keep your customer and keep yourself Top of Mind with your customer. And that’s where the marketing automation tool is really going to come into play. Oh, it’s been 30 days since the person’s last service, we should send them some sort of information, or it’s been three months since we’ve heard from this customer, we should send them something else. And that’s where those automation tools really come in and help you out.
I think small businesses have this hesitancy because, you know, sometimes margins are tight. Right? And there seems like there’s the software for everything, that you could get something that does everything, right, every aspect of your business. And so how do they decide that something is actually worth the cost? What are what are some things that go into making that decision?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, naturally, you have to understand what are the objectives you’re trying to accomplish? Like, what am I trying to do? And you have to look at the tools based upon those objectives. The second part of that is just trying to understand what is the opportunity that you’re going to get out of that or the opportunity cost? I think a lot of businesses have a little bit of a problem, because they automatically are like, Oh, well, how much revenue Am I going to make off of this? Right? It’s not about how much revenue you you’re going to make, it’s how much cost are you going to save to get there. So you have to love those equations, because that opportunity cost is really going to be what pays things off, not necessarily the revenue. And then finally, you have to make sure that the tool is ultimately going to accomplish whatever you set out to do and whether you’re going to be able to do it. I think the last thing that most people kind of kind of think about, especially if it’s them building the tools, right, they’re all excited, they know that they can do it, they’ll take it on. But sometimes people forget, hey, they’re going to force their team to maybe buy a tool, and that team is not going to be able to effectively use it. And we’ve seen that happen a lot of times where trades companies specifically will sign up for Salesforce or Salesforce CPQ queue and have this grand vision but then have no real way to roll it out successfully. And then they wind up paying all this extra money for a solution they’re not actually going to be able to use so you really have to kind of think out the process before you get going because you’ve got to get adoption of all these tools internally.
Yeah, no, 100% and I, you know, in a lot of businesses, people think that they you know, their only option is to You know, his top line revenue growth, right? That’s, it’s really common, right? They say, hey, look at our growth this year, our top line revenue, you know, we’re growing at X percent or whatever. And I tell companies and business owners that you actually have a lot more control over what’s underneath the top line, then you do over the top line, right? Because, yeah, you know, it’s somebody else spending money. If we’re talking about top line growth, it’s what is your company spending money on that affects everything else, right. So when you go in, and you start getting really efficient with systems and people and, and especially in a service based business, and most businesses, actually, the person knows their biggest cost. And so if you are going in there, and you’re saving time, you’re saving all these other tangential costs also, right? The taxes, and that’s a big one, payroll tax is a big one for a small business. And if you’re saving somebody’s time, you’re saving taxes, right. But there’s all these things that I think small businesses have a tough time grasping ahold of. And you mentioned, like, you know, somebody looks at a system, and they’re like, how’s that gonna help my revenue? Well, it’s not necessarily help your revenue, but it’s going to help reduce some costs, right. And not only that, it’s going to help reduce frustration of some of your employees. And if you reduce frustration with your employees, you’re going to keep them longer if you keep them longer than there’s all the great things that are happening within a company. Every year at a group of my companies, we we propose to our you know, all of our upper level management, hey, we’re gonna have this meeting, we want you to bring to this meeting, all the things that your people are butting their head against all the all the frustrations that that you’re having, so that we can discuss systems to get rid of some of those frustrations. Right now, we’re running into some issues with tracking leads, and you know, customer communication. We’re, we’re starting to develop our, our own software for to solve certain problems. What do you think of small businesses that aren’t necessarily in the tech space? developing software? Yeah,
you know, if you’re gonna I mean, I think it’s one it’s great. I mean, naturally, at the end of the day, I mean, well, our company like we’re an agency as well, right at Mugu, yo. But we have, I think we own probably five or six different pieces of software that are custom and proprietary to us. And I wouldn’t say that we’re a tech company by any means. But yes, we’re a tech company. So I think we blur the line. But I think it’s important for a lot of companies. One, if you’re going to roll your own software, one, make sure that nobody else on the market already has that. Make sure there’s nobody else doing it. And if they are doing it, why are you doing it yourself and not paying them? Because creating software is expensive. It’s a never ending journey. It’s not like you create it, and it just works forever. Yes, you can create it, but it’s going to have bugs, things are going to break, you’re going to need a developer. So, you know, I think that’s one thing that I would always be cautious of is should you really be building this yourself. But at the end of the day, I highly support people in building software that’s going to help make their business better, or even make their customers business better. I mean, in our third month of business, I think it was we opened the business, back in 2015, we had already created our first Chrome extension, because it was something that made our job easier and our clients jobs easier. And it was just something that we we created. I think we paid somebody on Upwork, like 500 bucks to build the Chrome extension. So like it was an easy no brainer. So I support people, I think more people should become more familiar with the software process, the end of the day software is going to eat the world. So like, you might as well get started now.
So when you created this extension, do you do you guys? And that kind of sounds like kind of a smaller project and some of the, you know, other things that you’re doing? But yeah, is it something that you guys offer on the marketplace, like with some of your, you know, helping similarly placed companies? Or are you guys keeping a lot of that just to be, you know, proprietary sources for you?
Yeah, so the first tool that we built was the effin amazing UTM builder, which is now totally company, which is called utm.eo. So that little Chrome extension that we had created, six and a half years later has blossomed into its own company. So we never expected that that was just something we put it into the the Chrome Store marketplace we use all the time internally, we use it a lot with our customers. And that was kind of what we had planned to do. But I mean, we started out really, really simple as like, this is something that is that’s challenging us, we have to build UTM tracking codes for all of the links that we make and all that stuff and getting our own team consistently making them and getting our client to make them consistently was just a problem that we face all the time. So we built the Chrome extension, gave it to our customers help them get it all set up. And then it was just something that we had used. Now over time, a guy got more and more popular as a free product. So we decided to turn it into a company and it’s now called UTM. But we have probably three or four other tools internally that we just use on our own. We’re developing right now our own personal notes tool that allows us Take notes on the web, kind of like a Google Doc. And then it sends notes out to everybody. But it’s integrated in with Trello, which is our project management tool, we have another Chrome extension, which allows us just to do AV testing, tracking, and something we only use internally, nobody else has access to it. You can’t find it in the store, but enables us to be able to track all of our AV testing experiments with our clients and document them quickly. We have the vice framework, which is another internal product that we have, which helps us score all of our projects and figure out where they’re gonna go. V stands for velocity AI impacts the confidence ease for us, it’s just a ranking framework. So a lot of the things that we have are built internally for our own team for us, you know, our stack builder, which can be found on our website, it helps you build your Mar tech stack, and it helps you put like, dotted lines, ultimately, to where data flows. And how’s it orchestrated, that’s a free product on our website, we use it internally as a sales product, and like walking working with our clients. But it’s it’s public, a website, anybody can use it any time, it’s something we intend to offer for free for a long time. So, you know, if you get good at creating software, like I have over the past 20 years, which I don’t write code by any means at all, and I’m not a developer, you can definitely build some really, really cool stuff that’s going to kind of help your business go to that next level or help automate your business to that next level.
So for businesses that are considering this, Hey, man, I’m really missing this piece. There’s nothing out there. It’s not super high budget, I think I can get it done. What recommendations do you have for them for one, finding a developer and to working on that relationship? Because my guess is that that’s an important part of continuing to develop workout bugs, things like that.
Yeah, for sure. Really, really? Great question. I mean, we’d find a lot of developers and a lot of team members on Upwork. So I highly recommend using up work. So Upwork has been a great resource for us. Even though you’re you’re opening yourself up to all these people, like you still have to be realistic. You’ve got to interview these people, just like you’d be interviewing anybody, anybody else, we highly recommend, excuse me, we highly recommend to ask for references people that you can actually talk to ask how they’re working relationships are. And then also try to make sure that you have some communications back and forth with whoever this person is. And then start out with some sort of test project and don’t have your hopes set all that high, right, like, don’t give them the full enchilada and buy everything off the beginning, give them a test project, have them do a small piece of it. So that way, you can kind of figure out if you can work together. And really make sure that’s going and then one important tip that we highly recommend, especially when you’re working on up work, a lot of people are going to be International, right. And I have developers all around the world, when you have developers that are international can be great. If they speak good English, they’re fluent and all that stuff. But there’s like some countries are better than others, we typically prefer a lot of developers out of the Ukraine, Russia, India is a little bit difficult, you’re going to get cheaper development work, in our opinion, in many cases, Ukraine is going to be a little bit better. One of my favorite countries to get development work is out of Brazil, same timezone, same color palette, which is also really, really important. And once again, it’s a little bit cheaper sometimes, and you’re going to find in the state, so but I would take your time and start out small figure out if it’s going to be a good working relationship, and then expand that relationship over time. So that way, you can really build that relationship with whoever it is.
Yeah, it just seems like it’s one of those things that, you know, it’s it’s a work in progress, right. And I don’t know that somebody that’s developing a platform wants to bounce around a lot. Right?
Yeah, for sure. But I guess it comes down to like, what are you building, right? Like, at the end of the day, if you’re building a small widget, like, it’s not that big of a deal, if you’re building a big platform, it’s totally different. But if you’re building a big platform, like, you know, you might start with some people on up work, but you’re gonna have to find a team. And if you reach out to me, I mean, my emails, Dan, and magotteaux, I’m happy to introduce you to any of the outsourcing firms that I work with for development. Yes, I had, my agency has the director of engineering that’s based here in the States, we’re hiring developers in the States, but half of our development comes out of another country.
I love it. Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about what are some of the mistakes that small businesses make specifically with marketing? What are what are you seeing out there? what’s common for you know, I’m talking about a million less, maybe even $500,000 in revenue or less? What what are some things that you might recommend to somebody that’s just getting started?
Well, the biggest mistake that we see happening in marketing at any business size, especially with small businesses, is that they treat marketing like it’s a diet, right? It’s something that you do once or twice a year. And you know what, when it becomes uncomfortable, I stopped doing it, right. Those are the companies that are gonna fail the most that marketing. Marketing is really like a lifestyle, right? You’ve got to be consistent with it. You’ve got to wake up every day and do it. You’ve got to be able to add it to your regimen and you’ve got to keep doing it. That’s the biggest thing about marketing that we see people really fail at is being consistent with it. And I will say this, it’s hard. I mean, if you’re a business doing less than a million a year, it can be really hard to find the time to keep doing marketing. And that’s one reason why it’s helpful to find contractors that can help you do some of this stuff, take off some of the work off your plate. But you really just you have to stay consistent with it, because there’s never going to it’s, it’s kind of like investing in the stock market, right, you have this compounding interest, which is going to help you ultimately be successful. And if you just aren’t consistent with it, you’re you’re never gonna get that compounding interest, you’re never gonna wind up with a million dollars in the bank. So you really have to focus on getting that consistency going. And that’s where I would say the contractors can really push you forward. If you find good contractors, they’ll help make you consistent.
Yeah, I think a lot of small businesses, they see the price tag, and they’re expecting immediate results. They’re expecting immediate and great results, right? What do you say to somebody that’s like, Hey, I’m going to I’m going to start a pay per click campaign, or I’m going to start, you know, whatever, an email, campaign, social media, whatever. And I expect immediate results. What do you what do you say to somebody like that?
Is Nice to meet you. Bye, like, thanks for coming. Right, you know, out of all of these campaigns, and I’ve worked at plenty of amazing companies that have done a ton of campaigns. Yeah, don’t get me wrong, there’s campaigns we push out there, and they immediately drive results. And there’s instant gratification. But those really aren’t the the big campaigns that make the company is successful. So you really have to understand that in most cases, you’re looking at a three to six month process to finally get to results. Whether you’re doing an email strategy, whether you’re doing a press strategy, whether you’re doing social media, yes, there’s going to be constant like pushes, you’re going to get from time to time, but for you to really start to hone in on what’s driving success of that you’re looking at it three to six months minimum, with PPC, in general, it takes three months just to get up and running. Right. So you’re not gonna see real results until six months in. And that can be hard for people to really understand. But it’s like, when you started your business, was it successful on day one? Or did you kind of have to, like work at it a little bit? Right around marketing the same way?
Yeah, that’s a really good point. And it’s, it’s not one of those things. And, you know, I, I’m guilty of this, you know, running a social media campaign right now. And, well, we’re six, eight weeks in nothing, right? And it’s like, man, I, you know, put a lot of money into this. And I was expecting at least something and but I think a lot of waste goes into just continuing to shift gears as opposed to, let’s continue. Let’s, let’s see it out. Right. And I think it’s helpful for entrepreneurs to say that in the beginning, hey, you know, I’m basically going to put the blinders on. We’re going to run this for three months, four months. And what happens happens, right, I’m not going to pull the plug, I’m not going to monitor it every day, because because I think that will eat at you. Right? You’re looking at, you know, whether you’re you’re hitting those numbers, or whatever. But I think that’s, you know, a huge part of marketing is, is patience. And I think where marketing has brought us today has kind of made us impatient, right? Back in the day when it was, you know, TV ads, radio ads, Yellow Pages, right? It wasn’t the somebody searches. They call me, right, I guess yellowpages could be that way. But there was a lot more brand marketing, marketing and development and stuff like that. But where do you see marketing? headed? Where’s it headed? What? Because I think a big part is like, I always wish that I was paying for clicks, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I wish I was kind of in front of the social media wave five, six years ago, whatever. Yeah, companies kind of get ahead of this wave get kind of get some traction. Where do you think it’s headed? You know,
I think content marketing is going to remain to be something that’s extremely, extremely popular out there. So I think content marketing is, of course, it’s something that you want to invest in. I’m still making money off of blog posts, or webinars that I did five years ago. Really, I highly recommend for companies to really invest in their content marketing. I think SEO, of course, is something that’s always going to be there, Google’s not going anywhere, you know, I think that’s can be helpful. I think video is becoming more and more popular, but I think there’s a high bar to entry in regards to video. The things like Tick Tock and stuff like that smaller bite sized content is, of course, becoming really, really popular. But hands down, I think content marketing is going to be knowledge and education is going to be still the best form of marketing for the next 10 to 20 years, that content is then going to become more personalized to us and our specific situations as personalization and an artificial intelligence gets more and more popular. But I really do think content marketing by far is the cheapest, longest, most lasting and best marketing thing you’re going to have for a good period of time and that’s blog posts, YouTube podcasts like this. They’re things that keep on giving, unlike PPC, once you turn once you’re out of $100 is off, like it’s not joining anymore. So same with direct mail. Same with many of these other Advertising mediums. But if you look at one of our blog posts, right, like it drives 20,000 visits a month, and it’s been doing that for two to three years. And yes, we updated it once a year based upon some competitors and stuff like that. But the amount of money we invested in that to the amount of return that we get, I think, is extremely exponential. And that’s why I say still in the future, I think content marketing is going to be one of the big channels for especially smaller businesses.
You know, what’s funny is that content marketing doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money, right? You can do it fairly cheap. Now, there’s videos, you could do a whole production and whatever. Yeah, but there’s a way to do it within a budget. But I think what’s happening is people are right now and I’m falling victim to this, too. We feel like we just need to put something out there, regardless of quality, there just needs to be something, right. And that’s not going to gain any traction. You know, everything’s getting flooded right now. And so what What tips do you have for businesses to make sure that they’re not just, you know, coming up with something on the fly. And they’re actually producing content? Because I’m assuming that when you talk about content marketing, you’re talking about good content, thoughtful content, useful content, because those 20,000 visitors that you’re getting to your website each month, they’re not they’re not getting there, because over the years that, you know, that hasn’t retained its value.
Yeah, know, for sure. We’ve added to it to make sure it retains its value. You know, you have to think like there’s a blog post that we have on our website, like how to build a lead generating content strategy. If you went to if you search like mageia, how to build a lead generating strategy in a blog post on our site, I break down the exact way that we go through building our SEO to understand like, what are the keywords we need to rank for? What are the keywords we need to write for? And then as well as like, then how do we go through and design a post, at the end of the day, you want to find the top 10 posts, so let’s just say like, and I’ll just use a stupid example. So like how to make a bet, right? Like, how do you make a bet, obviously, there’s 1000 blog posts out there, there’s 100 YouTube videos out there, you need to go read the top 10 posts that come back, when you search for that you need to go watch the top 10 videos. And then what you need to do is find out what’s missing in every single one of those and then add them to your posts, and then make your post, like 10 times better than whatever everybody else had, right? You’ve got to figure out what are the things they’re missing? How can I make this better, you really do have to push that quality bar even higher. And that’s going to be something that really kind of sets you apart from everybody else. And that’s something we do with almost every single blog post that we have trying to figure out, hey, what are other people ranking for? How’s their content? Good? How do I give my flavor to this, right? Like, how do I make the sound authentically us? And then how do we make it extremely qualitative. And a lot of that is by adding things in which weren’t brought into the other posts, adding more words and keywords and stuff like that is always a helpful part of it. But you really just have to make high quality content. And if you’re not a good writer, that’s okay, half of my blog posts that I’m attributed to started as a webinar, right, because I’m really, I can talk all day long. We started the webinar, we did the webinar, we had it transcribed, and then hired a writer off of Upwork, and then had that up worker, turn that webinar into a blog post. And it made it really, really easily and then you know, and I’ll use an example my book build cool shit, which is super awesome. The premise of that started from a blog post, or excuse me, a premise of a webinar got turned into a blog post. And we’re like, this is doing really good. Whoa, I’ve got to write a book, let’s let’s expound upon this and turn that into my book. And you know, the process was an extremely hard because I know stack, right? I know how to build stuff and know the tech stack. So I could talk about it all day long. But that’s where the writer really came into play, because I’m not the best writer in the world.
So are you saying like, you know, somebody in a, let’s say, they own a small car dealership or something that they just go, go online? Take Google, you know, what, what’s the best selling car or something like that something within their industry, see what the top articles are about that, see what they’re missing? And kind of direct their content into that empty space.
Yeah, take take the basis of those other blog posts, right, and then add to those so that way, like write out like, Don’t plagiarize them. But of course, like come up with your own blog post. Make sure to add whatever missing information there is to that, so that way you can make it even better.
I love that. I love that idea. I think that’s, I think that’s a great idea. I think a lot of times people what people are doing is, as opposed to seeing what’s missing will kind of try to just mimic what has already been done. Yeah, right. And I don’t think you’re gonna get traction that way.
Yeah, it’s okay to mimic what you’ve already done. But you’ve got to add multiple things that are missing from it to make it even better. Because if it’s not, if you’re just mimicking somebody else, you’re gonna wind up ranking next them or underneath of them, right because you’re just mimicking them. But if you take some of what they have, and you add a bunch more to it, That’s going to be when you outrank them for those search terms.
So if you’re, you know, you brought up a really good point. And you’re you’re kind of integrating SEO in a way when we’re talking about content marketing. Yeah. If somebody is like, hey, my key words are vehicles, transmissions, clutch, right? Do they want to start? And those are the things they want to rank for. Right? Within just whatever geo? Do they want to kind of take those words, go research? What’s out there and kind of develop their content around those those words in a blog post or other content? Is that going to? It sounds like it might do two things for them? It might it sounds like it might help help with their SEO, but also produce better content at same time.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I think the best way to think about when you’re trying to attract people for your service, right? What are the questions you get asked every single time by your customers, right? So if you’re dealing with watches and transmissions and stuff like that, like, what do I do when my truck my my transmission goes out, right, and then have a blog post that explains that I mean, I used to run a and I own a mobile app company, which did cheap gas. So help people find cheap gas. And our most popular blog posts were about roadside assistance, right. And people because they’re always searching for roadside assistance. Now, our app provided you the knowledge of where to get cheap gas and where to get discounts to gas stations. However, if you were needed roadside assistance, you would find us but that was your way of being introduced to our app, right? And then we’d be like, well download the app, we’ll get you to the closest gas station that can help you. But you really want to figure out like what are the questions that people are going to ask that are going to be tangential to my business, or they’re directly about my business, that have those keywords in it? And then of course, then do your researching off of that. Because if you at the end of the day, Google and YouTube, the two most popular search engines on the internet, what is the number one thing people do on it? they asked questions. So at the end of the day, your blog posts should probably be in the form of a question and your blog post is the answer to that, right. So yes, use those keywords. Like when you talk about a clutch like how do I know my clutch is bad? That’s going to be a blog post, which is going to help you do that Google search, you’ll find the five top blog posts and you’ll see everything they wrote. And then you’ll be like, Oh, well, nobody’s talking about this from Honda’s perspective. And I specialized in Honda. So how do we add Honda to this now? Right? So that’s going to be where you can really double down on that.
You know, what’s interesting is that entrepreneurs kind of what we’re doing is we are solving problems, right? We are we the goal is to create solutions that don’t exist yet. That’s like the ultimate goal or provide a service at a level that it’s not being provided at yet, right. And so the way that you’re framing this, you know, this content creation model, it’s the same thing, right? People out there have questions, and you have to add that value. You have to produce something that’s not just your you know, you’re spitting something out just to get something down, get something on your blog, but you are you have to find out one, what are the questions people are asking, what are those questions? What are what are things that I can do to add value to help answer those questions? And how is that going to work within our marketing plan? I mean, that it makes a lot of sense when you when you put it that way. And I know that my listeners right now, hopefully, you’re all thinking, Okay, what are questions people are asking that I know something about? What are things that people don’t know What things? Do people not know that I can kind of at least point them in the right direction? And just find those those kinds of holes in the market? As we’re wrapping up here? How specific because it seems like if you just keep drilling down further and further and further, eventually you’ll find a niche that there isn’t a lot out there, you know, you were talking about Honda, maybe they drill down to like, you know, civics and then you talk about civics from the 1970s to 1973. Right? How useful is it to drill down to like that specific of content creation?
Yeah, it can definitely be really, really helpful. But it can also be detrimental. You want to make sure that like and using Google’s Keyword Planner, right, and this is something I talked about in that blog post is you can figure out how to use the Google Keyword Planner. And you can literally type in the keywords and stuff like that and see how many people are searching for something. And at the end of the day, if you get too niche, and nobody’s searching for it, you definitely aren’t going to really like have a lot of success there. So you want to make sure that you still keep a kind of high level, the Google Trends tool. So if you look at Google Trends, you can put in any keyword and it’ll tell you this search volume for that keyword or search term or whatever, that will really help you understand if you’ve kind of pushed yourself too far into a corner and you’re kind of too far down there. There’s a book called chosen, which is all about entrepreneurship, but like choosing the right course to make. It’s a great book, but it talks about how do you find these terms that you can really write content around, it’ll get you enough movement, but there’s not already a ton of competitors on it. So you definitely don’t want to go to Nish to where you’re talking to two people, the more niche you can get and build a cluster of topics around that the better You’ll be
I love it. Well, Dan, where can people find out more you left us your email address earlier? Where can people find more about? Find out more about what you’re doing all the great things you’re doing in marketing and martech? You know, find out more about you How can people connect?
Yeah, for sure. You know, one thing I would recommend is i’d love everybody to get an opportunity to get a free copy of my book “Guild Cool Sh*t.” So if you pull out your cell phone, right, I’ll give you a number and you can text this, there’ll be some cool marketing tech for you, one, pull out your cell phone, go to your text messages, text, the number 415-915-9011. I’ll say it again. 415-915-9011 just text the word martech to that, and a text bot will follow up with you. So that way you can get a free copy of my book, and we’ll send it to you directly. That will put you on our newsletter as well. So that way you can get access to any of our information. But most people find me on LinkedIn.
I love it. All right, Dan. Well, it’s been a it’s been a privilege. It’s nice chatting with people that just know a lot more than I do about certain things. I’ll definitely be reaching out in the future, but it’s been a pleasure. And you know, thanks for sharing just a bit of what of what you know. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
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