Jay Baer: Stop Wasting Time Marketing on Social Media—Do This Instead

it'll sound crazy but I do mean it your unhappy customers are your most important customers because they're the ones that can give you something that you can actually use to get better marketing moves fast but if you're still stuck playing by the old rules you're getting left behind in this episode Jay bear world-renowned marketing strategist best-selling author and Tequila connoisseur breaks down what it really takes to win customers keep them engaged and turn complaints into opportunities whether you're running a small business scaling a brand or launching something new Jay's insights will change the way you think about marketing trust and customer experience get ready for gamechanging strategies a few hilarious stories and actionable techniques for business owners all right this is some of the most important customer attitudinal research ever [Music] conducted Jay uh welcome to the show I thought it it would be a great way to start if you would share that story from an airplane bathroom yeah well I've I've spent a lot of time uh in Airplane bathrooms Nick well not necessarily airplane bathrooms I actually I actually try very very hard to not use the restroom when flying uh but I've flown a lot I just checked uh my app the day and I'm over 1500 flights in the last 10 years so I I do have some measure of experience in this regard uh but it was really funny it was on a United flight which I don't which I don't typically uh fly on and and you'll see in in restrooms they'll say Hey you know don't don't put stuff in the toilet right because you know it's it's you're in the sky right it's not not traditional plumbing and that should be self-evident but you know never underestimate people and in this particular case there was a sign in the restroom right above the toilet said don't put anything in the toilet because Clogg toilets can cause delays and I just thought it was so brilliant to just with a an extra Clause there you put it back on yourself be like look you're only harming yourself here guy if you're putting stuff in the toilet uh and and as opposed to hey let's don't put stuff in the toilet for the common good like you may also see in Airplane bathrooms they have a um sometimes you'll see a sign that says in uh in courtesy to other passengers please consider wiping the Basin after use is how they say it right which is sort of like make sure the sink isn't all yuck when you leave I don't know that that works at all but if you said hey if this sink is dirty we're not taking off people would be scrambling to clean the sink right so a lot of times when you're trying to communicate with power and persuasion accuracy and and results you just have to make it about the person and you know where I learned that is I started in politics I don't know if you know this story Nick but I started in politics as was a political campaign consultant ran campaigns for congress Governor even worked on United States presidential campaigns and one of the things I learned as a very young professional in that business is you've got to make it about the voter um this idea that like let's do it for the common good uh doesn't really work and we've seen evidence of that most recently yes yes and so what what the story points at is that for a small business for a big business I mean anyone who's in marketing we need to align the behaviors we're hoping to elicit with the goals of the client yeah yes and also understand what is the present scenario so what is the mindset the needs goals wants hopes expectations of the customer perspective customer at every point of the customer journey and then what do you want them to do next I give you an example um in my previous consulting firm we did a lot of sort of website optimization studies and how do you make your website perform better Etc and and some of that's technical of course make it load faster blah blah blah but one of the things that we would do universally for clients is we would say for every web page every single page on the site what do people think in their head if they're on this page and what do they actually need and as a business what's the best possible outcome if somebody has read read this page right so where are they what are they thinking what do we want them to do next most websites are unfortunate in that they're organized sort of like a random collection of recipe cards just like all over the place where really you should think of a website more like a PowerPoint presentation right there's a beginning a middle and end like a narrative sequence that you're pulling people through and when you think about that kind of communication that way you end up with a much better outcome poorly organized websites remind me of somebody who's thinking here are all the things I want you as a client to know and it's it's very uh self-centered from whoever runs that business rather than being empathetic and thinking about what's the client going through and how do I meet them where they are there's an amazing like I I don't know who pioneered this I wish I could give them credit but I just don't remember there was a little app it probably still exists that you can use that will essentially go out and spider your entire website and then it will spit back a very simple piece of information which is very telling Nick it says here's how many times the word we or us is used on this website and here's many how many times the word you is used on the website right so are you writing it towards a perspective of the audience or towards a perspective of the company and just that one little data point tells you a lot yeah I agree with that wholeheartedly I don't know if you're familiar with story brand yeah of course yeah yeah and they do a wonderful job of communicating that idea and that you're trying to tell a story where the client sees themselves as the hero in the story but when you're starting especially for that small business owner you're so caught up in the day-to-day and the struggles of making it work that you see yourself as the hero of the story uh and and I thought it was just an interesting Paradigm where it's like you want to position yourself as the guide let's talk about a a podcast um so somebody is running a the the Nick Stanley show how would how would me and my team go about applying some of those principles with something like this and I know I'm putting you on the spot here um but yeah realtime Consulting is always the best kind of Consulting I tell you the one thing about podcasts and I I have um I have created 10 podcasts and I've recorded probably 1500 episodes so this is a topic that I've actually thought about a lot and uh many many people have asked me like hey I want to start a show how should I think about it Etc and I always have the same advice which is you're probably not creating net new podcast listeners unless you're a celebrity who's like wow I've never thought about listening to podcasts until Jason baitman made one but if you're not in that category the the audience of people who listen to podcast routinely it does grow over time but it is relatively fixed okay it's about a third of uh of people in the US so the question isn't necessarily um what should the show be about the the more important question is whose audience are you going to take because they're not gonna actually spend more time listening to podcast because Nick has a show they're going to spend time listening to Nick instead of somebody else and and so really understanding the competitive set and then requiring you to say okay then then if we're going to take somebody's audience what are we bringing that they're not bringing and so the the way I would say this more clearly is this is the question I make everybody think about when they ask about podcasts in order to do this well you have to be somebody's favorite podcast in the world their favorite podcast in the world of all podcasts and the only way you can do that is by being more specific not less specific the problem that most podcasts have is they're not tight enough right and so that consequently it's a show that people like but it's not their favorite show because it's not specific enough to their worldview their scenario their circumstance and so most hosts make the mistake of being too broad not being too narrow yeah I've been guilty of that myself mostly because I'm curious about so many different things that's the hard part right like you're like it's so boring to talk about the same stuff every week but just like magazines right if Sports Illustrated was about sports one week and recipes the next week you're like what the hell's wrong with this magazine yeah yeah and as we now have done a lot of broad gone into a lot of different subjects and have data on the people who are watching and listening we've noticed a few Trends small business owners are one of the the core demographics it appears and so bringing on people like yourself and speaking to their needs Uh I that that makes a lot of sense because that's going to engage them and people are more likely to when it when it speaks to their specific needs more likely to share it with others and and help whatever you're doing absolutely and and having you know having concise takeaways and and you know in some cases some some it's interesting some podcasts really go for a shorter run time because it fits into more consumption Windows right you can do it in a commute you can do it on the treadmill whatever and then you got shows like Joe Rog which is you know still the most popular podcast out there as far as I know you know it can go for hours so there's no there's no right answer there's just an answer that's writer for your audience but I think categorically most podcast hosts don't do enough competitive analysis or or even enough sort of competitive TuneIn like let's listen to the shows that you compete with because then now you're going to hear what your audience is also hearing from other hosts right right what are some of the biggest mistakes that small business owners make uh you know I would go all the way back to the e- myth um Michael Gerber's you know integral seminal work uh on small business ownership I think he said it right 30 years ago or however many million years ago that book was written uh you know you have to work on your business not in your business and it's so difficult as a small business owner to to have that perspective to to to raise your eyes up a little bit and say okay what are we really trying to achieve here because every hour of every day is something else competing for your attention and most of those things competing for your attention are are short-term problem solving fixes Etc and if you're constantly on that that kind of a hamster wheel of of what do I need to do this hour this day it's really challenging to actually move your business forward in a meaningful way and so one of the things that people struggle with is is bringing on additional resources like I I when I first started my business I've been self-employed now for about 30 years but when I first started I really had a problem with that as well you know I was still writing every check and going to the bank every Saturday and doing everything myself because I didn't want to spend the money to hire somebody and then you realize gez as soon as you bring somebody else on not only does it give you more capacity but more importantly it frees up your own mind to think about okay what can we now do in the next iteration of this business right so freeing up your mind share is actually more important than freeing up your time yes yes you wrote a post recently of about failing to communicate with customers and getting back to customers in a timely manner and I was just wonder if you could share that because I thought it was really poignant especially on the small business side oh you know I mean I wrote a whole book on this topic called hug your haters and it is really challenging because the best practice and I certainly spouse this is that in a small business scenario if you've got customer commentary customer feedback especially ratings and reviews on Google Etc the best practice is that the owner of the business should be the one to respond um because they it's their business right they can actually say we're sorry here's what we're going to do about it they have a level of accountability that that the team member may not um but again that all takes time and the business owner small business owner manager probably doesn't have that much time um but it is time worth spending right give give your team something else to do so that you've got time to actually interact with customers there's a couple reasons for that one in my research for that book we found that approximately onethird of all customer complaints not comments complaints are never answered and that's not going to make it better I can promise you that right like in fact the research shows that if you complain to a business and you don't hear anything back which again happens one and three times it decreases your net promoter score your tendency to Advocate on behalf of that business by more than 40% so essentially you're locking in their misery my good friend Shep heiken who's a terrific customer service author and speaker says a customer that you ignore is a customer you are preparing to lose and that is absolutely true furthermore nowadays there is a fair amount of customer communication that happens in public right not necessarily in a public forum but online ratings reviews people can see these things right so the important thing to understand is that yes you're trying to make the customer customer in question happy or happier but customer service today is a spectator sport in many cases right it's in social media it's in Google reviews it's on trip advisor whatever whatever and and so there may be dozens hundreds even thousands of potential customers that are looking on sort of eating their popcorn metaphorically to see how you handle this scenario and so the economic impact of interacting with customers is actually much greater than the economic impact of the One customer who has a problem and that's why it really is worth the time uh for small business owners to to actually put themselves in the middle of those transactions so if I own a restaurant and I'm dealing with Yelp and Yelp has this kind of extortion business model where you can't take down you can't address a negative review unless you pay them but once you start paying them they give you more tools to to handle um especially fictitious reviews because I have heard from some restaurant owners that oh yeah um someone will post a negative review about their restaurant and there's no proof that they actually ever came in in the first place but they're angling for something um but but let's put all that to the side for a second so if if I'm that restaurant owner because I think they get hit the hardest with Yelp reviews you're advocating that they should hug those haters respond to every review how let's expand on that a little bit yeah I mean the the thesis is every every review every channel every every time and you can really make lemonade out of lemons in that regard I'll give you a story from that book um there's a business called Fresh Brothers Pizza and they're based in Los Angeles and they've got I don't know how many now 30 something locations maybe so their owner Debbie uh used to she may not anymore because they are pretty large now they probably have a team to do it but until relatively recently she would answer every review herself and if she got a onear review she would say hey um thanks for taking the time first of all and and really sorry that's not the way we like to do business I'll tell you what if we sent you a $10 gift card would you promise to come back and give us another try if she got a five-star review Thanks so much for taking the time to let people know about your experience we are delighted that you loved it here at Fresh Brothers I'll tell you what um if we gave you a $10 gift card would you promise to come back but bring somebody with you who's never been here before genius now I talked to her and I asked her the question that you're probably thinking Nick I said hey um aren't you concerned about people scamming you out of gift cards right like whole series of negative reviews there's a positive she's like look we got a CRM right so we we we're not giving them out if somebody wants to make fake names and fake email addresses yeah I suppose but we're not too worried about that but she said look if I can for a $10 gift card know that I'm going to get either a bounceback customer or they're going to bring in somebody else that's that's actually a very efficient marketing spend uh for us like I'll do that all day every day not to mention the fact that lots of other people are seeing this interaction in Yelp and Trip Advisor and Google reviews and it changes the way they think about me and my company and I just thought that was really smart how does AI factor into all of this or Automation in general uh whether it's responding to reviews or responding to an initial customer inquiry or a message from the CEO because as you mentioned there aren't always there isn't always time in the schedule to do that U but I have seen products that exist now that will automate this process for you how do you what are your thoughts on all of that I know that's a huge question so run with it however you feel we're still in early Innings uh and and most of the software out there in the category is is now ai enabled in some way some more than others um it's going to have some advantages for business owners certainly speed of response which is Paramount that's my most recent book is all about responsiveness and Revenue um so being able to respond quickly because you can use some sort of automation to flag it and then send it um is critical um the ability to actually have a set of canned responses that can be deployed easily quickly more or less authentically uh is huge you've always been able to have a spreadsheet of things oh we say this we say but but with AI it's just much better it's reading the tone of the customer better it's writing it more um you know both spoke fact fion so that's that's going to help absolutely I think the one we don't talk about enough is AI as a decisioning engine so yes you can use AI to respond to more people respond more quickly automate what you say sure but I think where the real uh Improvement is to come is saying okay robot look at everything customers have said about us over the last week per location or per product line and then tell me what improvements you think we can or should make to that location to that product line uh to make sure that we don't get this kind of feedback like it will actually do the analysis for you which is actually the whole point of voice of the customer and and customer feedback right like the point isn't necessarily to respond although you definitely should the point is to say oh we should do better at that and then actually change your operations so that you are in fact doing better at there's a there's a thing that Amazon does uh this isn't actually put into practice because it would be impossible and you'll know why in a second but I love how they do this as a thought exercise okay so Amazon has this this sort of rallying cry inside the organization which is we should never have to answer the same question twice so if a customer has a problem or a question we should then figure out the answer make the answer so obvious that the next customer never has that same question again that's impossible to meet that standard but but as a as a goal I love it right and it's the same thing with customer complaints the thing that's so frustrating to me as a customer experien strategist is when I work with businesses who get the same complaint all the time and have been getting the same complaint for six months for six years for 20 years to which I say maybe we shouldn't focus on who's going to answer the complaint maybe we should just fix the thing right maybe we should just let's stop doing that how about that as an idea right so at some point you know the economic consequence of not fixing it is is worse than the economic consequence of spending time money and software to address it absolutely the now what tools do you recommend for some of that analysis to put some of to to make those changes to improve the business yeah I mean there is literally um dozens and dozens of of tools that will take your uh customer feedback and and tell you what it means generally speaking now uh as an industry it would be whatever tool you're using to um uh either create review responses so something like Podium is really good for small businesses um even something like a Survey Monkey if you're doing you know routine customer satisfaction surveys pretty much anything you use to either respond to reviews uh or or ask customers for feedback is going to have some measure of of AI driven analysis on the back end some more than others um so there's pretty pretty much just look to whatever you're using today and say okay what do you have for me in terms of making sense of what this means along this line here of interpreting customer complaints and and and seeing it as feedback that can help make us better yeah how does that small business owner differentiate between anecdote or an outlier case and data that there is a real problem that needs to be addressed and and fixed yeah it's a really good question because small business owners couple of things one um small business owners typically react to customer feedback differently than large business owners and that's because the they are so much closer to the business maybe they started the business it is it is their baby if you will and nobody wants to hear their baby is ugly even if your baby is known to me a monster like nobody wants to hear that right so yeah um we actually studied this in that book hug your haters that the the small business owner typically has some fairly challenging psychological changes when when faced with negative customer feedback right it actually triggers the fight ORF flight response which is not the mental state you want to be in when you're responding to to negative feedback U most big company uh participants don't have that same psychology because they're not it's not their baby they didn't start IBM right so that's part of the problem uh and then and the second issue is this notion that well that has never happened before that will never happen again that is a very very dangerous assumption Nick here's why all right this is some of the most important customer attitudinal research ever conducted I did not conduct it but it is been revalidated multiple times literally over decades okay this is this is known fact in in my world for every 100 dissatisfied customers only five will actually complain and that's across all the different ways you can complain that's social media that's asked to see a manager that's email that's live chat right that's hostage note like all the different ways right um five out of 100 so so what that means is that on average your mileage may vary but on average every time somebody says hey I've got a problem right 19 other people had the same problem but never said anything about it they just stop giving you money yeah and so the the notion that that people who complain are quote unquote bad customers or we can afford to lose them is actually really misguided because because the people who take their time to give you feedback for free are typically not always but typically doing you an enormous favor the the the people that rot your company From the Inside Out are those who are unhappy and just don't tell you anything because now you've got you've got no knowledge of what could be fixed which is why I like to say and I do mean this it'll sound crazy but I do mean it your unhappy customers are your most important customers because they're the ones that can give you something that you can actually used to get better absolutely I mean I'm thinking of an example right now so the our podcast is sponsored by a company I started 20 years ago where we do educational consulting services so that might be test prep uh for standardized exams uh College counseling we talk to school districts all all across the board uh various types of educational Consulting and there was a parent who asked to speak to me and I said okay yeah sure I I want to interact with our our customers um let's see what he has to say and I knew this guy had been a a long time customer and a very good customer and he said hey I just wanted to share with you CU I thought you'd want to know there was a shift within the company a position uh change somebody somebody had to leave somebody fulfilled that role and he said I was in the middle of a service when this changed happened and these are the negative things I've experienced since this new person came in and I really genuinely appreciated his feedback and will do anything for that gentleman in the future because it wasn't that the person that had come into the new role couldn't do the same things it wasn't a matter of Competency it was just a matter of needing the feedback to go oh see this is where he feels let down this is how it was better before let's address those problems and let's move forward together it helped the the new employee do a much better job it helped the business function more efficiently and this customer was then thrilled that we responded to that situation oh I love that it's it's such a great point and my friend Aon pepper used to be the head of guest relations at leanan which a chain of bakeries and cafes they're based in uh Brussels uh but they've got lots of locations in the US like 400 locations globally I think um and she started this program which I think is so brilliant when when customers would complain shouldn't happen a lot it's a good business but they would get complaints and people would complain if if it was not just like these guys suck I hate their croissants or whatever but if it really was a a thoughtful um communication of areas where they thought the brand was deficient just in just like in your example Nick she would respond respond in public as I told you you should do because there was public reviews then she would private message this person and say Nick I answered you uh on trip advisor but I just want you to know that as the head of guest relations I'm really impressed by how you really thought through what's happening in the operations here at leanu Tity and you you actually see things that a lot of customers don't see like you've got a real gift for this so I tell you what I'd like to do um if I give you $150 a month in gift cards would you go to three different lean tians in your city per month on us and just fill out a detailed survey of your experiences and so she ended up with like 50 people doing this secret shopping them providing all kinds of super rich data and feedback for the cost of gift cards brilliant that's brilliant yeah yeah yeah cuz you wouldn't be able to hire somebody for a mon to go do that no and and people you could hire our our secret shoer experts right so they always feel like that's a little bit you know what I mean they they almost know too much this is a real cons yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like on a related note one of the things I say on stage a lot is uh the most important review you can get is a three star revieww because now why is that well nobody writes a three star review unless it's unless they really have something to say and you can you can check it yourself right there's not that many three star reviews to begin with most reviews are ones or fives that's mathematically proven because of course they are right you know this place sucks or this place is great to to write a three star review which is yeah it was pretty good but this other thing could have been better like it requires a level of thoughtfulness that most reviewers don't want to do and that's why three star reviews are typically much longer they're typically balanced both good and bad and so you can learn lot about the true nature of your operations by paying attention to any three star reviews you get same is true at some level twos and fours but but threes are the best that's great that's great now what do we do with those one star reviews the guy the the review that says this place just sucks challenging yeah it's challenging when you don't have anything to go on right so so the best practice is to respond and say hey Nick uh thanks so much for taking the time to leave a review uh it seems like you didn't have a great experience I would love to work with you on that because we're always trying to get better uh would it be okay if uh you just shot me a quick email told me a little bit more about how we disappointed you here's my name it's j bear JJ bear.com I'm the president boom and and then you know some of those will take you up on it some won't but it doesn't matter because again it's a spectator sport right so all these other people are like oh wow they just said these sucks and the president of the company is like Hey we're really sorry email me about you know what your problem was and so it just it says a lot about the organization its culture when the next person to see that review sees that we responded and made a good faith effort to to actually you know bridge the gap yeah and one of the things I picked up on in in the book and you're alluding to it here is it seems a key strategy is to respond publicly for The Spectators y but simultaneously take the conversation offline to directly address the concerns of the customers yeah you don't need to get into a super detailed operational tit fortat in a in a public uh reviews platform that's probably not going to benefit anybody but you do want to make it clear that like yeah we we're paying attention and we are willing to uh to take our medicine and and and what have you now one of my rules is to your point Nick is is J Bear's rule of reply only twice never ever ever ever in a public setting respond more than twice to anybody ever because it's either not going to help you it's going to make it worse or you're just wasting your time so somebody says you suck terribly sorry how can we help you email me I don't want to email you you guys just suck sorry to hear it hope to see you again sometime like you don't don't try and like wrestle somebody to the ground in the comments like it's not going to work uh and it just burns your time what about say comments on for a influencer or if you've got something on YouTube however you're whatever type of content you're putting out we know the comments sections in on those forums specifically can be absolutely brutal and there's kind of a game to just trolling people in those forums how do you recommend people approach that pretty much the same and I do it every day I mean I am the number two tequila influencer in the world um I get dozens hundreds of comments a day on Instagram Tik Tok YouTube and Beyond yeah I me I make I I do 20 videos a month about tequila and and not everybody loves every video and that's fine that's okay and and most of them I do respond to um I especially respond to the negative ones more so than the positive ones um but I I try to respond to all unless it's somehow violent or or you know there's something that's really over the line then those people get blocked that's just the way it is um but anything that's like hey like I'll give you an example one of the comments that I get most often typically on Tik Tok because our audience is more International there is who is this Gringo to tell us about tequila my families from Mexico some version of that uh with with varying degrees of ir uh happens a lot and and so I typically respond to those all the time and said thanks very much I understand why you might think that but you probably should know that 68% of all tequila in the world is consumed in the United States which is more than double the amount that's consumed in Mexico further most tequila brands are't even sold in Mexico they're only sold in the US consequently I think our perspective is important and valid but feel free to not pay pay attention to the channel if you disagree um and you know just just kind of you fight fire with information not fire with anger and you tend to have a much better outcome right now how important is social media if you've got let's say a service-based business or a a coaching business there is certainly conventional wisdom that you need to be buying ads and boosting posts on social media but I certainly hear back anecdotally from a lot of other business owners they're not finding great results these days like they used to through social media unless they have a massive massive following uh but especially for people who are just starting something new where where do you see that fitting into the Strategic picture yeah it's definitely harder than it used to be um partially because costs have gone up and partially because the tracking isn't as good right so many people have turned cookies off clearing caches uh you know on on iPhone ask app not to track like and so the social media platforms um all of them collectively they don't know as much about you as they did even six months ago certainly not three years ago and the less they know about you the less targeted the ads can be therefore the less effective the ads are therefore the less profitable it is so the whole thing is a little bit uh challenged in that regard um especially for small business owners my advice is to think of social media as the way to take people who who like you and make them love you so how do you use social media not to create net new customers out of the sky but to actually take people who already know you at some level and get them to buy from you more often to get them to buy uh from you in a larger dollar amount to get them to tell their friends about you which becomes a word of mouth virtuous circle right so think of your social media program more like an email newsletter less like a let's just create customers from whole cloth and I think you'll be much better off that's that's interesting what what is an example of treating it more like a newsletter yeah so uh okay there's a guy um on Tik Tok and he's in Tennessee and he is a home inspector that's all he does inspects homes right works by himself uh you know you're buying or selling a house need an inspection that's what he does and so he makes videos all the time uh about like hilarious things that he finds wrong with houses like really wrong like this door isn't even like connected to the wall kind of stuff right and he's you know he's not disproportionately good at camera or or voice over he's just there every day right and he's seen it all and he's like this is full of rats or whatever and and he has like millions of followers and all he did was just document his day now if you're in Tennessee now his audience of course now very much transcends his trade area but if you're in Tennessee and you see his video see another one or you use him as your inspector you're totally going to tell all your friends that he's the guy you should use right so it becomes this this kind of word of mouth generator for his business and I would say just as a social content strategy most small business owners would be well served to not try and promote their services in Social but rather to document their services in Social right like the thing about small business owners is they think that what they do is boring but it's actually fast fasinating to everybody else it's boring to you because you do it every day right I mean making tequila videos every day isn't that interesting to me anymore because I've done it 500 times but for everybody else it's interesting right so this idea of just showing people behind the scenes what it's like to be somebody who has a pest control business or runs a test prep company like I would love to know exactly how you figure out how to prep People based on changes in questions you know cultural differences you know Baseline learning aptitude of different clients and students like people are trying to use social media to make a movie and they should instead be using social media to make a documentary about what they do every day and it's pretty easy to do just turn on the camera and just film what you do that's a great Insight because yeah my initial reaction to that is that that wouldn't be fascinating to other people but now that you mention it when I'm trying to be more empathetic and I think about how fascinating it is for me me to learn about other lines of work that those people think are boring they're just unfamiliar to me I'm sure the same would be true for test prep uh andever look at TV look at TV Dirty Jobs Ice Road Truckers Deadliest Catch right like all of these are just people who have a job you know and if they turn into a whole TV show right so you can certainly do a one minute Tik Tok on on test prep right right uh yeah absolutely love Dirty Jobs I mean that's me too Mike Row is awesome you should get him on the show he'd be incredible I really should I think he's in in high demand these days but I have I have just last week uh reached out and was just said Mike I love everything you do and your voice is amazing and I just want to chat for a few minutes and great example of I mean that all started with he was filming something in a he was down the in the sewage and somebody came along who had to they fixed the bricks down there in the sewers under New York City and he just started talking to him and just said like this so this is your this is your job and they got into this long conversation about how these bricks needed to be replaced and what it was like to work down in this environment every day and it turned off a lot of people because they aired the segment on a different show and he said but the key was all this feedback that said oh you think that that job is bad let me tell you about this one let me tell you about what my brother-in-law does yeah and it is absolutely fascinating yeah and and he started off as an opera singer right so you know you know and then became all the things that he is so you never know yeah yeah what are some of the new tools people should be looking at to help connect with their audience in a authentic way I mean I have certainly found that running podcast even though we don't talk about test prep on most episodes has been this incredible tool for people just getting to know who I am what we're about what our values are yes and they really connect with that and then and then they trust us on these other services even if it's you and I talking about marketing at small businesses which isn't directly related to delivering test prep they go oh this is somebody who who has certain values that align with mine that's someone I can trust and and feel better about making that purchase so what are what are some of those tools and forms we should be looking at I mean this is not new information but I think it's um newly important which is you have to have the ability to use reliable reach to get in front of your audience the problem with social media of all shape sizes and descriptions is that that unless you're paying for it it is unreliable reach I put a video out to my audience uh tequila audience and some days I get 100,000 views and some days I get 15,000 and some days I get 1.5 million and I think I know what works but I clearly don't otherwise it would all be 1.5 million right and so the algorithm is a Fickle mistress and and and if you're like okay we're just going to create content and hope that these public companies who are interested in them making money not you are going to deliver this message to people for free you are going to be disappointed I can promise you that so the list the list the list the list is what is important um we have an email list on our tequila business of 37,000 people and we add a thousand people a week right and we publish other we publish lists go to J tequila.com you can get on the list which is our 83 recommended tequila brand and we do a different list every month uh and and we ask for your email address to get that and that's how we build it why is that important well if I want to send you an email with links to buy different Tequilas I can do that whenever I want I don't have to rely on Zuckerberg I can do it myself now maybe email's not your bag doesn't matter maybe you want to build a WhatsApp Community maybe you want to build a Discord Community maybe you want to build um a text message Group which is actually increasingly popular it doesn't matter what what format it is but you have to be able to reach your people when you want uh and if you don't build that list you're going to be uh challenged in in the months and years to come so what I would encourage people to do is come up with something anything it doesn't matter something that your audience wants and then use that to build permission to communicate with him this goes all the way back to Seth Goden who hav always been on the show his idea permission marketing from 25 years ago is more important now than it was when he wrote the book because now all the other ways to communicate with customers have kind of faded away uh and been replaced by algorithm so it is really really really important um so I would be I'm sure you're already doing this but I'd be making the 17 things to think about before you hire a test prep company ebook um and I'd be getting email addresses on behalf of that and then I'd be you know marketing people that way yeah with test prep and we have a huge email list thousands thousands thousands across the country just like your tequila list and I speak a lot at various schools into into big audiences and and so there's people coming into that list all the time and we put out content online that is just educational and helpful and that helps build that list but if you're let's say you're you're starting that new coaching business I'm thinking of of somebody else who's uh who recently came on the show her episode hasn't aired and she's running a mindfulness practice for athletes and has wonderful tools to share with athletes but it's a brand new business she's she's got a um uh a small number of devoted clients at this point um but really wants to expand how what tips would you have for her to build that list because I think this will extrapolate to people in whatever industry they're in yeah I think you you create um an asset right um which is the 11 things to know about mindfulness that you didn't know or whatever right so you create some sort of free asset some sort of trip wire we call it in the biz um and then you merchandise that on your little website and then you create some organic social media content that says hey I've got this amazing resource uh all it takes to get it as an email then you augment that um that free organic reach with probably a little bit of paid at least to start getting the list right and then ideally you build a system into into it so that when people get on the list uh if they want to unlock the next level piece of content which is even better than the 11 tips for mindfulness um we're not going to charge you because we're all friends here but instead uh if you want to unlock the super special 33 tips for mindfulness all I want you to do is uh is is send this to three people right so then so then that one person becomes four right um and and that's how you start to grow the list that's a that's an excellent tip and for you okay so let's say you do that and you're asking them to share it with three people in an email do you have any followup if they actually did that or not or they just responding yeah sure I I shared it it depends on how serious you want to get I mean there's definitely software out there that that both email software and um sort of you know viral com software that will allow you to to govern that and they actually have um you give them three different um promo codes right um and then the person who is receiving the invitation um from from your initial list subscriber uh puts in the code right and the code is Nick uh and that way I know they did it and it all ties back together so it's all totally doable it just depends on how you know how how serious you want to get about it and and just to expand on the you mentioned Seth Gooden's permission-based marketing and it just occurred to me that we might want to just explain that real quick uh for anyone who's not familiar with his work and and what that is and why it's so even more important today than it was when he first wrote about it yeah it it almost seems axiomatic now but when he came out with it it really wasn't and a fun fact um I know Seth and we spent some time together it's it's a little bit hilarious in that my partners and I in my very first internet company uh 32 years ago nick uh we sent as far as we know the very first spam email in the history of the internet uh we were very early in the internet business and uh some personal injury attorney wanted to reach all the people with email addresses which was not very many people and we're like oh yeah we can figure out how to do that uh and so we did uh and so I guess unintentionally I'm responsible for spam um uh and and what Seth had said many many years after that but many many years ago at this point is the way to Market to people is to do so with their permission to say we're going to give you something uh and in exchange uh you're going to get you know it's it's a value exchange right it's a it's a value relationship you give me the permission to communicate to you and I'm going to give you resources or things that you actually desire which again seems very obvious now but but at the time he wrote the book was was really groundbreaking and and for a long time it was like yeah yeah yeah whatever but now where the only other way you can reach people fun other than you know newspaper ads or Billboards or something uh online the only other way you can reach people is governed by algorithms right and and so you have to sort of please this this robot that you don't know anything about um which again is very fickle and so we sort of get all the way back full circle to well just say hey is it okay you give me permission to send you good stuff now are you going to reach as many people arguably no but the people you are going to reach actually give a [ __ ] [ __ ] about what you're sending to them and isn't that worth the tradeoff right right cuz having the huge list of people who don't actually care about what service you're offering is worth pretty much nothing yeah I mean go you know listen to go read Chris Anderson's work on a thousand true fans right like that that you know you can build any business with a thousand people who actually really care about you and will buy whatever whatever you have to sell like you can build an Empire on a thousand people right um You just have to think about it that way absolutely I had a great conversation with my 12-year-old son the other day he asked how many followers do you need on a social media account to make money and it opened up this interesting idea of well you could have a million followers if there's no trust there when you recommend something those 1 million followers are pretty worthless you take a guy like Tim Ferris he could have a th000 followers and his followers trust him so much any recommendation he makes they are going to run out they're going to buy it if he comes out with a new book he I mean he could go back to zero and as long as he had a thousand of his fans he has many more true followers than that but with that thousand and just share a new book that he's written they will go carry that out to the world it would spread because those thousand people would share it with others because they trust him so much and so we got into this conversation of it's not the size of the following or the list it's the inherent trust that's built in and are they passionate about what you're communicating about I mean no doubt I mean all you really have is is trust that's really your only product at some level uh in that kind of circumstance we face it every day I get emails every day every day um from from large corporate tequila brands who say would you promote our tequila to your very large audience here's a bunch of money and like no sorry we can't do that right because once we once we violate the trust of the audience then the whole house of cards collapse and and there's it's just there's no way no no way or no reason to do that right and it can be difficult but it is the it is the key because if as long as you come back to that idea that trust is the that's what keeps the the entire house uh firm and standing upright yep I wanted to turn to you had a post recently that really uh I thought was provocative and it and it made me think about something I hadn't considered before which was the importance of a tactile piece for your company could you share a little bit more about that yeah I mean we live in this this digital virtual age now where so many of the things things that that we transact with are are never exist anything other than pixels right you know we're sending PDFs instead of mailing proposals that kind of thing you know um and and and it's hard because some businesses are purely virtual I understand that but even if you're a purely virtual business as as I have been for many many many years you know you can still deliver something that has three dimensions and when you do that it actually has a disproportionate impact on the client or perspective client because it's just a typical now right so um there's a a wine company uh that actually has on their wine bottle on the label it's it's perfed right and it's like a little like a postage stamp almost it's Molly dooker um wines and and it it kind of rips off the label and it's like post you can take it with you it's like oh this is what the wine was like I really like that wine and so yes people take picture on their phone but it's actually more cool to kind of rip it off and now you have it in your pocket or whatever that's really great um one of my good friends uh here in BL Indiana where I live uh is a pizza magnate has like five pizza restaurants there you know it's a college town here so they sell a lot of pizza so much pizza but they have been doing it for 25 years that if you order pizza in a drink you get these 20 ounce plastic um like Stadium cups like you'd get in a football game and they're different different years and all that and and he has now uh produced like literally millions of these cups millions in a town of 100,000 people like every single person I know in this town has in their house I'm not even kidding 15 to 20 of these cups right uh and then of course all the college students use them to play beer pong and all the other kind of stuff so typically in a pizza business like once the pizza's gone like right there's nothing there's nothing left behind right but you this idea of something tactical and tangible uh can be really powerful and we used to do it this is years ago uh when my when my very first Consulting businesses again it was the kind of thing where people would email proposals right so we did this deal this is only for big clients big opportunities Nick I don't want to make it seem like we did this every day but we did it a few times we would take the proposal print it out put it in a plastic sleeve then we would go to the bakery and we would say okay take a sheetcake put the sheet cake on top of the plastic sleeve then decorate the cake as if it were the cover of The Proposal then we would have the cake delivered to the client so in order to access our proposal they would have to eat cake and then you know then they then they got to wipe off the cover I mean it was like a whole ritual uh and and people loved it they certainly never forgot it right um of course now we're partially doing Word of Mouth Consulting so it really fits into the thesis right but but that idea of taking a virtual business and doing something physical with it um is an idea that can be really effective oh that I I mean that's brilliant I would if if that happened to me I would never forget that experience let alone be ready to sign wherever the dotted line was a 92% conversion rate on that deal right yeah I bet I bet um well and I know you are pressed for time because you are probably flying across go drink teil that's kind of how it works it's for work there we go there we go um any closing insights tips tips thoughts that you just want to put in the head of those small business owners that they can that they can run with here yeah we we talked about at the outset Nick um a lot of the things that we've discussed today require you as a small business leader to spend a little time thinking about what's possible and I understand as somebody who's owned small businesses for a long long time how hard it is to give yourself that time to to kind of create the mental head space be like oh yeah we could get a cake whatever the circumstances are but I really do encourage you whether it's doing additional delegation to other people or just putting it on your calendar unstructured time where you're just going to sit and think uh and consider what is possible uh that will be time well spent absolutely I couldn't agree more uh Jay it has been an absolute pleasure this hour is just like a treasure Trove of actionable ideas for uh and when I say small business owners I mean that that ranges up to in in my mind up to doing $20 million a year um and I think uh whatever size company you've got um this will be of of huge use for them and uh thank you so much I we were we're going to put links to everything you've written your your newsletters your various companies your books uh which I highly recommend to uh anyone who wants to learn more uh useful marketing customer service techniques and and and and not just the techniques but they're told with interesting stories I just really appreciate all the work you do and I want to help spread those ideas further thank you I really appreciate that really enjoyed spending time with you and the audience and hope everybody got something out of it okay everybody until next time ask questions don't accept the status quo and be curious [Music] n