The Mill #12 – Digital Marketing 101

The Mill #12 – Digital Marketing 101

The SEO joke is where do you hide a dead body? On page two of Google because nobody looks there.

Welcome to Rocky Mountain Forest Products, this is Gil Datz with Uzu media and this is today’s The Mill. So kind of leading into the Christmas break, wanting to give you guys a little bit more meat on some of the new marketing things that we’ve been talking about on the mill. Gil runs a branding/digital agency out of Colorado Springs called Uzu media.

So today we want to talk about the fundamentals of a well-rounded digital marketing presence and kind of the importance behind it. During the last recession, a lot of businesses went out of business because they weren’t relevant in the current landscape in 2008.

The next recession that we have, anybody who didn’t pick up what they should have done in 2008 will more than likely be non-existent after that. So today the five different places we’re going to touch on is your website, your brand name. Social media SEO and paid search, also known as pay-per-click or SCM in regards to the construction and building materials industry.

So that’s kind of a real brief overview of what we’re going to be discussing, before we dive in real quick, I just want to get a real quick brief story on you and Uzu media and what you guys are all about. Yeah. Well, if you’ll remember, Taylor and I have been friends for a couple of years, but we started using media after my last business failed, which was also in the construction industry. So we were an upstart deck building company in around 2007, going into 2008, before most of us really knew the problems that we were having with the economy. At that point, we were at the beginning of it.

Nobody really knew how bad it was going to be. But one of the things that we ran into was people had extra income to spend on things like decks up until that point, so we were fairly confident. My business partner at that point had worked for another decking company. We decided to roll out on our own and within a very short amount of time we realized, number one, we were overbidding based upon people’s budgets that were changing because their wallet, they lost all of their disposable income. So we lasted a whole eight months before we noticed that there were businesses around us. One of them in particular that I remember was a cabinet company that was down in Colorado Springs that was going for 16 years. They went out of business before we did, but their margins had changed so much that I guess they were operating close enough that as soon as they started having cash problems, they realized that they had to change our business in a short amount of time.

Well, that was a different dynamic in 2008. The whole reason there was a boom was because of the real estate market. The big wall street banks were lending out all kinds of money to people who basically couldn’t be actually approved for those types of loans with all the subprime things that were going on.

And so money was flowing in abundant into all these new properties and then literally the properties quit being funded and went bankrupt. Yep. So now people aren’t going to be renovating properties that are literally going back to the bank. Yep. And the other thing that we ran into is refinances on people’s houses, which were considerably easier at that point, was where they pulled a lot of their income to do upgrades to their houses and things like that. So basically,  outdoor living decks, things like that, which we were going after that went away very quickly. Yeah. So that’s kind of leading into what we were talking about.

One of the last few videos that we’ve put up was that three part series, the Rocky Mountains brand strategy. And we’re really big on branding because brands can live through recessions. It can live through changes in culture. People don’t buy peanut butter just because somebody is cooking them on the internet.

Actually, there were the old campaigns back in the nineties. Everybody knew what peanut, a Peter pan, peanut butter. There we go. It’s real fast. I don’t think I can. So, that’s kind of the stuff that we want to talk about, but in the relevancy within our industries, not only do you want to be building a brand, you also want to be building a brand where the attention is.

Attention is the arbitrage that makes marketing work— where everybody is focused. You can’t sell somebody something until you have their attention, period. Like it could be as simple as hey, but now you’re looking at me. I mean, it is a very basic concept, but that’s what marketing is. You grab the attention.

Before you can actually sell them something or preach your message. So the part that we’re going to be discussing today is where is the attention? Yeah. So let’s kick it off with the concept of a website. Why is it important for companies to have a website? The different aspects of what a website provides for the company and also to their clientele?

That is one of the big points that they’ve worked on in the past is website design. They’ve won some different awards for it, and they actually did the RMFP website, as well as a couple of our ancillary sub-brands. So, let’s kind of start there. What makes a good website and why is it beneficial to a brand and their clients?

And especially, with where the economy might be going, because everybody keeps hearing this, that we’re possibly overdue for another recession. When that happens, you don’t want to be relying on it. The thing that you were doing 5 years or 10 years ago. So one of the most important things with talking digital in general is that, especially the next generation, you might have most of your clients and customers,  a certain age group and older, but when we start to phase out or move on to the next generation, they’re going to be looking for signs that you’re not just handling one part of your business. Okay. They look like they are going to be looking across channels. So one of the things that we usually say is the website is the thing that a business can control most. And that’s where you start your business card in the modern era. Yeah. I mean, people have business cards, but let’s be real; nobody actually hangs onto them.

They give them to each other, they get lost in the car and they get thrown in the trash, even the real nice ones still. They really don’t do anything. Yeah. Everybody’s going to look up a business’s website first and foremost, and kind of the areas that from how Rocky views a website is not only does it portray like your business’s knowledge, and kind of the external culture that you want, but it’s a really, really, really good pre-qualification tool.

So if you’re a contractor, let’s say that you only work with certain brands or certain clients that have a level of budget. Let’s say your higher end designer, higher end contractor, and you don’t build houses that are less than seven figures. A really simple website that has the different projects that you work on is what you’ll need.

That looks expensive. That looks nice. Talks about your very intensive design setup and also a brief form that can pre-qualify everything from the name, your timeline, and also your rough budget can supply a business with a really good quality lead. Rather than just hey, I made a phone call to just check and see if this company wanted to work with me.

Not every client is always great for every company. So, when you guys are designing a website, kind of walk me through the different areas of a website that’re important. And why are they important?

Sure. So one of the things about the website, number one, a great design is still a great design. It’s going to help, especially if it’s in line with your brand and brand meaning colors, logo,  what you want to express. Even what Taylor was talking about, the idea of pre-qualifying,  also kind of works the other direction, pre disqualifying.

So if you find that you’re having a lot of people talking to you about your projects or your products and they’re not a good fit for you, you can refine your website to make sure that you don’t get the wrong kind of people knocking on your door.  With that, almost all of it is going to start with your homepage.

So your homepage is like the front door of your business— how it’s designed, how it’s set up,  is all super important because it’s basically geared to have what are called CTA. CTA’s are called ‘calls to action’.  The purpose of a website isn’t just to look good, that would be like building a really beautiful house.

And then you realize later that you don’t have enough money for furniture, carpeting, anything on the inside is paint. And so if, if the website doesn’t accomplish what it’s meant to do. It’s just a really pretty website. Having great design is a good start, but you also want to make sure that it’s geared.

For the user, the person that you want to become a client,  to be able to make some definite decisions while you’re on their website. So,  the homepage needs to be set up well,  having a tab, a menu item that’s set up to talk about your services or your products that you have.  Obviously, if you can sell online, having an e-commerce section is going to be really cool.

And part of that, a lot of people also,  one and learn about your company. So having an about section that talks about either your company history projects that you’ve done before involvement with the community,  all that’s really important because a lot of people don’t just do business with a company.

They do business with people. That’s how they think about things. So you find that like-minded people attract. So anytime you can talk about how that’s impacted your company and the decisions you make, ultimately the culture that you have,  that’s always something good to highlight beyond that,  a really good contact page so that people know how to get in touch with you.

And you just want to make sure that all that’s Lined up and working really well.  Really, nothing’s more annoying nowadays than a slow site or a site that when you start clicking on things well, and even from a functionality standpoint, these things right here are the world,  more than 60% of all web traffic is on one of these devices nowadays.

And so making sure that your website’s mobile responsive. It’s fast on mobile because there is a difference between speed on a desktop versus speed on them on a mobile device. So those are some of the important areas to that. Let’s jump right into branding. Yeah. So why branding, from an appearance side, some of the things we’ve discussed in my previous videos.

We’re branding from internal culture to external culture to,  not just the imagery of your brands, like everything through and through, but in a digital environment. Why does branding matter? Number one, I would say it’s about what somebody can expect when they run into anything that you create.

So a lot of brand or brand identity, as a lot of people talk about it, is important because it gives them a consistent experience. So in the web design world,  one of the words that we throw around is two letters together. And it’s called ‘user experience’. A lot of people when they’re expecting one thing and they get something else,  like if you were to change your logo every time that you put it up, or you use different versions of color, a lot of people may not be trained.

To understand what’s happening, but something feels off to them. So I would say branding,  and a lot of that would just be things like logo,  typeface, font color,  having consistency of icons, making sure that things are designed well,  that you’re not just grabbing something off of like Google stock,  the imagery, things like that.

All very important. And then on top of that, all of that comes together in a way that when you use the content that you’re going to be producing for your site for social media, for different things,  it creates a story. And the more convincing story that you have,  the more educated you’re able to help your clients be through that story.

I think it’s going to help. So from the way you’re describing both the website and the branding, it kind of reminds me of the dating experience. Whether you’re trying to pick up a guy or a girl, you pick your clothes, you pick your hair, you go to this specific restaurant of the similar type of person that you want to meet.

You’ve got your pickup line, you’ve got your initial hook to bring them in and get them before they start to dive into who your personality is. And if these things are set up well, you might be able to pick up somebody and move on from drinks.

To an actual meal, relationships are relationships.  So anytime a person’s involved, I think what works over here works over here. So yeah, I think, I think the dating profile idea and how you move out of the dating realm into something more serious. It is similar to a client process. Yeah. As our next subject is social media.

That’s kind of, when you start diving into somebody’s personality a little bit, I’m figuring out their quirks and their family and why they do the things that they do. The behind the scenes look at the business. So let’s jump into social media. What is the main purpose behind social media for a business?

Yeah.  So it’s interesting because I’ve been teaching digital marketing for the last couple of years as a part of what we do. And this last class was the first time that I almost changed how I would set things up. And I, and I think,  in some senses, social media has clips, almost every other type of marketing at this point.

And if it hasn’t eclipsed it yet, we were hinting at this earlier, I think it’s going to happen next year. No, it absolutely could start to start to switch over from some of the old sales and conversion aspects, moving into branding as a whole, like the thing that’s nice about social media is that it’s, you can run sales and conversion off of there.

You can run search queries, you can run different pay-per-click things, but at the same time, it gives you the opportunity to brand while you’re doing it right. One thing,  when you were talking about this earlier is most,  most consumers nowadays as Gen-Xers and Millennials age up as a whole, you said that we don’t buy just off of a single thing.

We’re more— we care more about multiple other concepts within the business, right? How are they connected to their community? How… Sorry, Tye is waving at me because my hands aren’t in frame. No, you’re shaking the table either way. Sorry. Taylor missed the camera view, I apologize to everybody.

Who’s tending tenets? Okay. Taylor speaks like an Italian. He was Italian in a past life. So. Probably not.

Yeah. Okay. So, I don’t remember what I was saying. What was I saying? Gen-Xers have multiple channels. More often than not, nowadays people end up on your website first because they’re going to look up the company. Then they’re going to see the look and the feel of the branding. But they want to get an idea of what the culture is, right?

How was it going to, how do they want to get some expectation? It’s kind of like a dating profile, going back to the dating analogy. They want to go see their interests, where does the person work? What types of things do they like?  Do they have certain cultural beliefs, or the same idea on social media?

Look behind the scenes into who you’re going to be spending your money with. Not necessarily just the nice prim and proper outside look it’s no, we have fun because we have this really cool warehouse like Tradecraft and the community that goes on here. Maybe it’s something where it’s not very professional and everybody wears suits all the time and that’s because we are always business oriented, all of those different things, speak to different people.

And so from the Gen-Xers and Millennials position,  from a buying psyche, they would rather spend money with somebody that they actually get each other, right? They’re like-minded, they have the same kind of core concepts of beliefs. As the buying trends continue, who we typically spend more money with.

Right. So over the last couple of years,  one of the things that surfaced is there’s a progression  towards distrust of advertising in general  because people have run into a bad experience in one way or another, but it’s also a reverse trend where they’re trusting what happens on social media more and more.

And so one of the things that I think is great about that is if you can let people into your business, through social media before you actually let them into your business, there’s a higher level of trust because they already feel like they start knowing you. Yeah, well, and not even, not even that it helps, like in our world, over at Rocky, it helps kind of skip forward in a few steps of the sales cycle.

I don’t have to sell who I am anymore. I don’t have to say all my reviews. I don’t have to say how long I’ve been in business. You already know all that. You already feel like you have an actual connection with me. So now we kind of skip some of the romance,  we move past the pickup lines and we move right into the hell.

Let’s go on a date or, hey, what’s your phone number? Right.  So with that, Taylor mentioned something that’s super important. A lot of people fear reviews, and you really shouldn’t  as long as you’re a decent business, providing a decent product. You really shouldn’t be afraid of your reviews.  One of the things that people understand nowadays is that there’s always going to be the, what they call trolls.

So if you look through probably even our two businesses, you’ll see that there’s a hater or a troll. Somebody that’s got something negative to say, but if your reviews generally are anywhere above three point seven in the four range, people understand that there’s going to be something negative.

And then the other thing that you want to make sure is that you’re just answering anybody that has something negative to say. If you’re constantly getting those things, it’s more of you probably need to fix things about your business, but social media, for the most part,  people want to know what you do when you have a problem.

Not that you have problems or not. Everybody knows that problems happen. We have a contractor that works with us on a consistent basis. We put this social post up,  I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago. And his quote was basically, I’m sure Tye remembers, I’m sorry. I want to get the exact quote, but basically it was:

Don’t look at a company’s reviews of what, the things that they did right. Call a customer that they wronged and find out how they fixed it. Hmm. That’s good. Because that is the business that you want to work with. How somebody fixes it, all a problem is, is an opportunity to do better. Yeah. And on the other side of it, everybody does not always get along.

Everybody has somebody that doesn’t like them. There’s even days in my life where I haven’t even liked myself. Let alone another person. So it just kind of happens. We all run into them.  Yeah, and I think that’s the most important thing is just people inherently don’t trust what you have complete control over and social media offers a realm where,  I think one of the things that social does is it levels the playing field,  small businesses, large businesses all have the opportunity to compete there.

because it’s primarily not about money. It’s about connecting. So the last two things that we’re going to talk about, both of them are more,  calm and nerdy— nerdy on the side of the marketing world. It’s SEO and then paid search.  But there’s lots and lots and lots of new dynamics that are coming into play in both of these worlds that I think most people need to know about.

So Gill, if you can kind of give us some overview on both what SEO is and what paid searches are. Sure.  SEO, first of all, is ‘search engine optimization’, short definition. First, it’s basically the things that you need to do to make sure that the search engine search engine optimization can find you. So it optimizes,  based upon what the search engines are looking for.

For everybody out there who has no idea what he’s talking about, when you Google something and you scroll past the things I say, ads, it’s the next thing that shows up in line on the Google searches. Yeah. And the technical term for that is ‘organic search’. So basically we’re going to be differentiating between SEO, organic search and then paid search, which are like Google ads and things like that.

I also kinda throw social media advertising in that direction.  Depending on who you’re talking to, it can separate out whoever says it’s not a part of that is behind the times, because that is a new version of Pacers, but we’ll get them there for a second. Yeah. So nowadays it’s the cheaper version, which is why a lot of companies are turning that truck.

Don’t use it though because it’s fun, we’ll get to that. Yeah. So SEO, why does SEO matter to companies in the construction and building industry? Why  is it important?  Up until recently,  Google wasn’t fixing this and now they’re actually going in analyzing sites that they can crawl. And that’s the Google robot, which tells you what’s going on on the site.

but they’re actually, Google’s analyzing your site. If it’s set up incorrectly now it’s helpful. Almost like a book. If you were to pick up a book and it didn’t have a cover page, it didn’t have a title, if it didn’t have any kind of description; you’d actually just only be able to read the book, read book after book and really not know what you were choosing. Having the right things on your site, the right titles, the right header tags.

I know some of this is probably too technical, but without those things, Google really can’t tell what you’re the site’s about. It’s basically your title, your chapters, and your sub headers underneath your paragraphs. So when those things are set up deliberately and they’re done well, you’re more likely to rank ahead  in Google than what anybody else is.

So, should I tell my SEO joke? Oh, you might as well. We’re already there. Did you guys know there are SEO jokes?  So the SEO joke is where do you hide a dead body? On page two of Google because nobody looks there. And it’s also a substitute for a dad joke, but it’s basically true.

Because when you go looking for anything, people are actually more likely to redo a search, then go on to page two and three of search results because Google’s like basically training us to think I searched the wrong thing, as opposed to, if I keep searching, I might find the right thing.

It’s time. It’s time. The only thing that people care more about besides money and privacy. It’s time. Yep. So it’s quicker for me to type something else in the search bar than it is to scroll all the way to the bottom and go to page two or three or so on and so forth. Yeah. And then,  with that,  the higher up you are for any given search results.

So those search results are basically called keywords and a keyword can be one word or it can be a string of words. So for instance,  one of your guys’ main keywords would be like,  decking, like track status, second Denver.  And, and that’s those three words are actually a single keyword and then the reason that’s important is certain keywords are a lot harder to get than other keywords.

So any good SEO strategy is going to have longer keywords, multiple keywords,  as a part of that or one or two, two keywords, which is a whole lot more difficult to go for. The part that we. That we’re missing on this is why does that matter? And it’s fairly simple in the construction and building trades industry.

These are high dollar things. Yes. There, there,  you’re getting your entire kitchen redone. You’re redoing your bathroom. You’re adding a deck, you’re building a brand new building. Most of the time, people aren’t doing these things on a regular basis. So why does that matter to you, the consumer or to you, or to your client for the people who are viewing this.

Our industry has a massive research face. Typically on average, most people will research a construction project from four to 12 months in advance, depending on the size and scale of it. It could be two to three years in advance SEO. When you get on Google and you type your searches, what is the best decking material?

What is the best type of granite? How should I design my kitchen? How do I design my kitchen? So Miss Susie doesn’t make fun of me because she’s the hipster in my neighborhood and I have to be relevant. Yep. All of those different keywords are going to pull up those search results then who are the best contractors in Denver who were the best deck builders in Denver.

So those are things that people can actually set their website up.  If you’ve got really good reviews, you can say we’re one of the highest rated deck building companies in Denver, for instance, and you’re more likely to come up for that than somebody that didn’t do that well. And they’re going to research so early in the buying cycle even before they look at a price before they start budgeting, because they don’t even know these things.

The average person only builds a fence once every 20 years, they only build a deck once every 15 years, and they move every five years. Yes. And so it’s one of those things where they’re not comfortable with it. They’re probably more comfortable buying a house or a car than they are redoing their kitchen or bathroom or basement.

And so for you, the contractor, or for you, the building materials manufacturer, they’re going to be researching your product so early that by the time that they’re ready to spend their money, You need to make sure that they’re, they’ve already fallen in love with your brand, with your product, with everything before they’ve ever gone and gotten a quote you need to provide.

I’m jumping on a sales rant here, just because it should provide the value of the product. People always get hung up on price. Sales is very simple. When value exceeds cost, a sale occurs, a transaction occurs at a certain price. Blueberries will sell at another price they won’t.

Nope. At a certain price. People will buy a deck at another price they won’t. And that changes depending on who the person is, the budget they have, the social class that they run in; lots of different dynamics. The part of the country that they’re in and all of those things can be pre-qualified with everything above.

So you set the stuff up above the person who starts searching. They fall in love with you, your company, your brand, whatever. Then three to four months down the road, now they’re calling you to get a price and there, now you’re competing with yourself. You’re not competing against seven other companies that look exactly the same.

They’re like no company, a hipster construction and company B,  I don’t know, boujee builders. They have the exact same branding and feel that I want. And so, no matter what, they come back  with price-wise, I’m going to pick company A or B. Both of these companies are going to be more expensive than the 17,000 other ones that are pulling leads off of Home Advisor rather than actually marketing their company.

Right. Yeah. And you just said something that’s super important. Back to the sales process, all those different factors that you mentioned, primarily emotional ones. So people make their ultimate. Everybody wants to think that they’re logical.  But when it comes down to the final buying decision, you might write a list of the pros and cons.

You might think that you’re weighing it out, but a lot of people make their last decision, their final decision based on something emotional that they’ve experienced along the way. So back to it brand is primarily about the look and the feel of your company. If somebody doesn’t like the feel of your company, if they.

Look at your website, they look at your social media. They sit there and they’re like, ah, they didn’t really do a great job. They kinda, half did it. It’s a half-baked strategy or set of tactics that they’re doing. They wonder what else you’re going to do that way. Well, and the authenticity and all that matters I can get on somebody’s social media and look through their site.

And if every, every three posts or literally three out of every, every four is asking me to buy something. Yeah. That’s not usually somebody that I want to go with. Like, like you had a romance, a girl a little bit, you got to throw in some of those, some of those one liners, you gotta buy her a drink. You got to take her to a nice restaurant.

It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a three to four month period. That it’s true in relationships and it’s true in business, which actually happens to fall together because most good long-term businesses create relationships. Yeah. Well, and back to that, if the ring comes out too soon, It’s usually not a good indicator.

So if somebody tries to close the sale before they educate you well enough before they build the sales process before they get there, there’s an appropriate time to make the ask. Yeah.  and then there, then there’s those people that are just like, hey, time is money.

We’ve got to do this really quickly. I’ve got four minutes. And you’re like, ah, let me learn a little bit more about you. So having a good multichannel. Marketing,  strategy. So website branding, social media, SEO, and then there are all the other things that you can do in the traditional means. So this we’re primarily just talking about digital, but maybe we’ll cover that conversation some other time, but multichannel marketing is important because people have learned, especially nowadays we’re hearing all kinds of different things about who you can and can’t trust in the media and different things like that.

People want to see more before they make their decision. It might only take five minutes more to research it, but they’re going to use that five minutes. Here’s the kicker in our modern era, you don’t know that they’re wanting to see more because it is all happening in the research phase. Right? 10 years ago, they had to call you, they had to come into your store.

They had to interact with you first, before they could go look at all these different things nowadays. We’re going to stick the crap at everybody. Yeah. That’s true. We don’t call it stocking. We call it researching, but it’s actually stocking. Let’s just be real because you can look at all these companies, everybody has their social profile.

You can jump online, you can see that I’m there. You can see that ties on there and you can see that Tye’s mom comments on our videos, and you can go click on her Facebook and go learn about who she is. And you can learn that Tye is from rural PA and that he’s a great dude who loves the Packers, even though they’re not in the playoffs.

And that was on purpose.

Okay. Somebody paid me five bucks to do that. And it’s in this video. Now, the next thing is, but you can get a good read on everybody ahead of time. So you can find out if that’s the person that you want to work with. So on the last thing, primary social media is basically organic social media, traffic, and SEO is organic traffic around search engines.

Paid basically accelerates both those processes and creates more visibility, more attention. So kind of walking, walk me through the difference between organic versus paid. Yeah. And so if you’ve, for instance, if you’ve looked at any Google search results, what you’ll find is that Google has real estate at the top of the page that is geared towards the people that are willing to pay for that.

and then there’s the rest of the search results that are geared towards organic search. Sometimes that’s something that you’ve done deliberately. Sometimes you kind of look into it for a lot of really competitive industries. There’s really no such thing as lucking into a go, it’s purely intentional.

Yeah. For, for those kinds of things. But if you sell ugly Christmas cat sweaters, you’re probably not going to have a whole lot of competition for that.

But eventually there might be. And so one of the things, Uzi media is located in Colorado Springs. That’s where I live.  RMFP is up here in Denver.  Denver’s competition is considerably higher than what Colorado Springs is up against. We might have decent competition for some things, but Denver is a much larger city.

The competition is greater. So for instance, it’s just more people fighting over the same pie and there’s, I mean, it’s really as simple as that, when the supply goes down and the demand goes up the prices. Yep. And so industries where there’s a lot more money to be made or lost. Uh that’s when competition goes up.

Yeah. And so one of the things you want to consider for your business is really figure out what one or two extra sales would equal to you. If you’re selling a fence and building a fence costs. The average fence is three to five grand. Okay. Material. If a deck might cost you $20,000 and then a remodel on a kitchen is $80,000, you can kind of work backwards and figure out which one’s probably going to be more competitive and where you might need to spend more so back to paid search, which was one of the things that we were talking about to differentiate from the organic traffic.

Paid search becomes very competitive very quickly.  Because one click, not one sale, not one conversion— one click is how Google and the other search engines figure out how much you’re going to pay for traffic. There’s other variants to it, but that’s the most popular variant where you’re paying per click.

Yeah. And it’s basically like, based on bidding, man. Sure. Yeah. Just like if you went to an auction, you bid, you bid on cars, everybody knows how much they can put in ahead of time. The only difference is it’s like you have  fawns over here and he’s the person who’s bidding for you because you’re not on site and you’re on the phone and you’re like, hey, I can spend $22,000 on this car.

But not a cent more. And then on the other side, there’s Geraldo and his, his bidding person, and he can spend $23,000 on a car, but these two don’t know that their budgets both exist. Right. And in reality, maybe this car is only worth $18,000 or maybe it’s worth $50,000. And that’s kind of the, that’s where the bidding metrics and the prices kind of come from.

Very similar to eBay,  where you basically go in knowing that you want to accomplish something. You’ve probably got a budget in mind.  But what a lot of people don’t realize, unfortunately, and they waste their pay-per-click budgets is that you have to number one, capture your budget. And a lot of people don’t do that.

And then on top of that, you also have to set how much you will spend on any particular click. A lot of times, people don’t take that into account. How many clicks you might need before somebody calls you, and then how many calls you might need. Basically you close a sale, general sales kind of things.

And they wind up overspending on pay-per-click.  The other thing that used to happen for anybody that fears this,  Competitors used to be able to click through other people’s budgets, but Google’s pretty much put a stop on that. So they might, I get the same thing on Facebook. They all have IP tracking nowadays, a clicker, two through.

But if either of those,  like Facebook or Google notices, things coming from the same computer, the same IP address. And it seems like it’s set up to waste somebody else’s budget, they realized that they needed to change that really quickly, otherwise they were going to run into lawsuits and all kinds of problems with that.

Yeah. Well, and, and one of the things that I want to jump on with paid search, we were talking about the difference between pay-per-click on Google or on Amazon versus on social media. And so,  just,  I’ll give you guys some real legitimate data. So last year,  I won’t give you the exact dollar figures, but I’ll give you some generalities.

Last year, we spent X amount of money on social media, and that provided about 4.4 million impressions to generate 1.2 million impressions on Google. It took me four and a half times to generate only one quarter of the impressions on social media. So when given talks about which actually is probably one of the better rates.

Oh, you guys probably accomplished a better rate than a lot of the places we did. Like, in the lumber industry, it’s like, I will be transparent because none of this is secrets. If you are in this industry and you go look, you can find the exact same data that I have. The lumber industry from a pay-per-click standpoint is actually fairly low on our cost for clicks.

where like a bottle of wine. If you search for wine, it would probably cost you between $11 and $18 for that click. If you,  somebody were to search. I dunno, fence picket. It’s like $4 and 15 cents, which is ironic because this thing costs $20. Whereas maybe my fence pickets only cost $3, but typically people now need more than one fours in one.

Let’s hope people are only buying a single bottle of wine. Let’s, maybe a case for our collectors out there, but there are industries like that. I know Gil has told me some stories about one of his other clients who was in the magnet manufacturing business, in a single click for them could be worth six figures.

And you’re only talking like $15 cost per click, right? So you can go through quite a few before that, that risk versus reward actually flips to the other side. And for those of you that have watched through to this point, this is where you get to learn a little bit of the secret sauce.  The reason that these ideas are so important to you is there’s not a whole lot of people in your industry taking advantage of these things.

No, it’s not most contractors bringing business to us. We’re either going to put out bids based upon different offerings that come up on the general commercial market, right? Option A, or option B. We’re going to go use Home Advisor or Angie’s list, or one of the billion places looking to charge you money for leads that you may or may not get.

They both work. They both build strong businesses. Wait a second. I thought Angie’s list didn’t ever charge for it. They don’t charge the consumer. That’s it. Why? Well, it’s like, okay, like a TV channel. How do you like TV? Doesn’t sell anything? How do you make money advertising, advertising? Yep. It’s how Facebook works.

It’s how Google works is how they all work. And so, what this kind of allows you to do is over here, your bidding against 52 places over here, you’re bidding against four places to somebody who may or may not actually need work. When you’re marketing for yourself and you’re branding for yourself and you do it well, you’re only competing with yourself, right?

Yeah. And I think the other thing that’s important to remember,  especially with the cohesive strategy of what we’re talking about, but especially for either paid search or SEO, and social media, to a certain extent, what you want to do is be find-able when people are searching for you. Yeah. So there’s, in general marketing terms and in sales history, there’s kind of two approaches to this.

So the old school way of talking about this was basically push marketing versus pull marketing.  Nowadays, one of the ways that we talk about it is as outbound versus inbound. What you’re looking at for the most part, what we’re, we’re chatting about as an inbound strategy when people are looking for you?

You’re find-able yeah. The outbound parts of this would be for instance, like the paid search,  that’s the part where you’re. To a certain extent going to chase people down. But the really interesting thing about paid search is that a lot of people don’t know that Google actually has a portion at the top of their page and the bottom of their page that has paid its advertising.

The middle part is organic and you can really take advantage of that if you’re doing advertising and you’re found on maps, like the three pack and you’re found organic search, people are like, oh my gosh, I’m seeing these guys everywhere. It’s real estate. Yep. If there’s only 10 spots and I grabbed one in the ads at the top and I grabbed one in the maps because I’ve got good reviews.

And then I show up for SEO down here, and then I paid, I sure cheekly pay for the, another advertisement down at the bottom. Now I’ve covered 50% of the real estate on a single page. Yeah. So let me follow up with a question. Wouldn’t people say that’s going to get too expensive. No, it doesn’t. Because the fact is they click on the top.

It’s going to track that IP for 30 days. I only get charged one time on the reviews part. That’s built up over time. That’s organic. That’s completely predicated on your business and how well you do business. And then the SEO part, maybe your cost per click on pay click is $10 per click, but maybe you work with an agency, your SEO rates are $1,500 a month.

Once you start showing up, you could get a hundred clicks, you could get a thousand clicks, you can get a million clicks, and it’s still only going to cost you whatever that base retainer was with your agreed upon SEO rate that you have. Right. The other thing to take into account is,  Number one time value of money, how much time you’re spending on this.

and then on top of that, whatever you are directly spending, what your ROI is. Yep. So with those two things, it’s just general business, business sense for this, but a lot of people will spend way too much time. Like they’ll try to build their own website for instance and it doesn’t mean that you have to come to a company like ours to have your bill, but having somebody else build it that’s trained to do that.

It’s probably going to be a way better use of your time. So you can go out and remodel the kitchens or build the fence, or do whatever, do what you’re good at and let somebody else do what they’re doing basically. Well, yeah, absolutely. Like I do not know how to build websites and I’m unapologetic about that.

It would be better for me to, rather than sit there for months on end trying to build this website. I could take on five more projects. And complete those projects in the same timeframe. Right. And even though I had a deck building company years ago nowadays, I wouldn’t try to do that. I haven’t kept up with things.

I don’t have the right permits. I don’t have the relationships for that anymore. So even if you might’ve been good at something a long time ago, a lot of time to keep up with it, for instance, like social media and SEO. SEO has probably fit so Google’s algorithm probably has five to 10 major changes per year, and then hundreds of smaller ones going on all the time.

Like this year, it was ridiculous. And then social media, what worked for their advertising platform a year ago? Not even that is, I mean, it’s drastically different— Congress is a brand new platform. Now they have gotten rid of all kinds of fun things. They’re all gone. But ironically, they’ve put lots of new, fun things back in place for it.

Yeah. So they’re constantly changing. They’re constantly developing what happens one day in social media can literally not be there the next day, or you can get a new update. One of the newest updates. I’m going to talk about this because I haven’t really seen anybody talking about it. And it is a brand new Instagram update.

You can actually leave direct messages by voice on Instagram now. It came out less than a week ago. There’s some up-to-date information. I can literally record a voicemail and send it to you over social media now. And he’s telling me something that I haven’t heard yet. So that’s great. And I use Instagram daily.

Yep. So the day that it came out, I’m not kidding you, I probably sent like 40 to 50 voicemails to people like celebrities that I wanted to meet. I figured I’d look and here’s the kicker with that. Almost half of them listened to it because it gives you a little notification. It’ll read. Well, I think it would be funny if they changed it to a little ear.

We’ll get in touch with you seriously. But, I think we’re about to run out of time. Gil, if people want to learn more information about who you are and what you do, where can they find you? How, how can they get a hold of you?  All of our social media is at UZU Media. Our website is easy.

Dashmedia.com.  You can leave us comments below wherever this video is showing up the multiple places that it might show up, and we’d love to interact with you on social media, and we’re happy to get in touch and chat through any issues your business might be going through on these guys. For all their flaws and wonderfulness at the same time, they rebuilt our website, both Rocky mountain and Granite Liquidators.

And they also help us out with that. A lot of our SEO strategy and they’re pretty good partners working with us. So I do appreciate that, but all right, once again, I’m Taylor Poole with Rocky Mountain Forest Products, and this is Gil Datz with Uzu Media and that was today’s The Mill.