How to Succeed with Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of building better businesses. But actually we are building better developers who are developer noir because that is our focus is where developers and entrepreneurs meet right here at this podcast, hopefully. So if this is what you're looking for, you're here. You found it. And if it's not, you found it anyways. You also found myself. I'm Rob Brodhead. I'm one of the founders of too much finding in that one of the founders of developer noir and building better developers. Also a founder of RB consulting where we we help you just like wrangle that technology sprawl that's out there. We work with you to understand your business, craft a recipe for success for you. That is how you leverage the technology you have, the technology that is going to help your business, including whether that technology is something you buy off the shelf, their innovation, integration, simplification, automation, all these different ways that we can make technology work for us. And also maybe even build out a team that will help you build technology moving forward. All of those things we can do for you, helping you leverage this biggest investment, which is your investment in technology. And practically every business now has to do that. Good thing, bad thing. There are so many of these like right now. So a good thing, bad. This is an interesting good thing, bad thing. So this would be an educational thing for people, I think. Several years ago when I bought my house, because the prior house I had practically slid down the hill that it was on. We ended up having to go, like they had to dig 30 or 40 feet deep with these steel girders basically to hold the house up. And no, this was not built on a hill like you see in California or something. This was just in like a smaller hill. However, the house was starting to settle. And so when we sold it, we had to do a lot of work to like jack that sucker back up. So I got to my current house. One of the first things I did was make sure that everything was copacetic. And it was. However, there were a couple of things were like, well, you could do this better and you could do that better. So I did. So we like jacked up the household better, straightened everything else and like made sure that it was rock solid. We're not set. We're not on sand. We are on like solid ground and did a bunch of other things like here in Nashville. Every house has dampness problems like crawl spaces and basements just weep all the time. It's just what happens in the earth around here. So we made sure that we had stuff built in to clean some of that out so that you don't get too humid and you don't have all the issues that water can in the air can do, which is a good thing. Made it a really nice house. The bad thing is, is now that it's on the market and when it's being sold, people see that and are like, oh, there must be something wrong because you wouldn't have done that unless there was a problem. And so we have to explain. No, there wasn't. So a classic, I'm just trying to do the right thing. And yet still somebody is like, I don't trust you're doing the right thing. I think you're just trying to fix a problem. Maybe that's it. Like right now, I'm going to fix a problem that I have talked and have not had Michael introduce himself. So go for it. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders of the developer NURT building better developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we work with small to mid-sized businesses who are struggling with their software, struggling with their technology stack. Essentially, they have software that does not work for them. They've had to implement processes to essentially do things around their software that their software doesn't do, which takes more time, energy and money. So we walk in, we come in, we do an assessment. We help you identify those pain points. We define your processes. And through a test driven development approach and mindset, we walk through all your user stories and we come up with a plan to either upgrade your current technology stack or build you something cohesive that will basically do everything for you in one application instead of multi-tier. Let's see. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing. Well, we'll start with the bad thing. So the bad thing is we got a boatload of rain last week, a lot of rain, so much so that I had rivers flowing all over my property where rivers should not flow. The good thing about that, though, was a month before all this weather hit, out of the blue, the guy who resurfaced our driveway years ago came by and was like, hey, I haven't seen you in a while. Would you like me to resurface your driveway? We're like, how much? And he gave us a pretty good price. It's like, sure. Came in, surfaced it. And if he had not done that, we probably would be replacing the driveway right now. So karma is a funny thing. Timing matters quite a bit. This episode, it's not really about timing, although it sort of is, is we're going to talk about like digital marketing kinds of stuff. And this is the timing thing of this is that these are the things that are actually, hopefully evergreen that they are great for creating, hitting a customer when they want to find you. So they're 24 seven kinds of things. These are the things like your website. If somebody searches for your website at midnight on Saturday, while you're out partying, that's okay. You've actually been marketing during that time. That's the time they want to see you. That's the time they want to learn about you. Then that's the time that you want to be available for. Now that's the thing about these, these marketing approaches. I'm not going to get deep into it. You can talk about SEO and some of those kinds of things and how you hit the right people at the right time and play the Google game and all that. That's not really where I want to go with this because it comes back to yes, you want the eyeballs, but before you get the eyeballs, you better have a good, consistent message. It's like what, okay, now you have their attention. Now what do you do? So let's instead of say, okay, you've got their attention. Now what do you do? You say, okay, what are you going to do when you have their attention? So we're going to think ahead. We're going to assume that there are going to be people there. We're going to get visitors, we're going to get all that kind of stuff. We're going to get the right people at the right time, but now we've got to make sure first, let's make sure that we have a message that matters. Now from a digital point of view, this is, this is actually something I think we don't think about often enough. Now, if we're a designer, yes, but if we're a developer and even a lot of the entrepreneurs, like the pure entrepreneurs I know, they can be very visionary, but we tend to, we tend to not think enough about explaining our business, about selling our business. Because it's, it's usually, we are drinkers of our own Kool-Aid enough that we're like, this is great. Everybody should do this. This is awesome. I mean, you should just send buckets of money to these people because, you know, being yourself, because we do this so well, you know, you may never want that product, but you probably should buy it anyways, just in case we have that kind of mentality usually. But what we need to do is take a step back and think about, and this goes back to like, we've talked about so many times, it's sort of your why, but it's also what is the problem that you are solving for your customer? One of the interviews I did way back, I think it was an interview, it may have even been with a customer, a customer interview that I did, but basically what she had worked on is in talking to her customers, she realized that there was about five different, essentially questions that their, her customers needed to answer. That was how they would come to her because they were asking one of these five questions. Now you may have one, you may have 10. If you have 10, you're probably too broad, but there's going to be some number of either questions or problems that is very, this is where we niche down a little bit is that we say, well, this is a problem I want to solve for you. So it may be things like you're trying to find all of the, you know, the Pokemons in your area. Okay, cool. This happens to be what our business is. If you're happening instead to want to know what the latest, you know, Dr. Who synopsis was, well, you're not going to different business. Okay. So you don't need it. We don't want to talk to you. But what you do want to do, and this is where the idea of funnels and thing like that come in is this is where you start with like a sort of cast a larger web, a larger net, and you try to pull people in and then start the conversation. And so from there you want to refine the conversation. So it could be things like, and you'll hear this in, for example, in the pitch that I give is one of the keys that I hit on because it is near and dear to my heart is I'll use the phrase technology sprawl, because that is something I see with a lot of my customers that they have this sprawl. They have too much. They just have too much. They'll have 10 different types of technology and then we have two people working in it and it's like, okay, if you have more technology environments and you have people, then you, you have sprawl. Honestly, if you have more than like one or two, you probably have sprawl of some sort, because even huge companies that can, they have so many people and they can support dozens of technologies. Then part of the problem is then they have to integrate them and they have to cross train and they have to do all these things that just, and then, yeah, you're sort of betting on everything. So, but that means that some are going to be losers. Yeah. Some are going to be winners, but you're going to have losers. And now you have to port or migrate or do something off of those losers at some point. So that's one of the, like the wide things that we look at is like, okay, are you tired of having too much technology? There's a lot of people that, a lot of companies are in that boat. Now, then we're going to talk, you know, you go a little further into the funnel. There's going to be things like, okay, are you ready to act now? Is there something that you want? Maybe you're already, you have a team, you're already addressing this. And so it's like, all right, we don't, you know, we can help you, but you're probably not an ideal customer because you've already sort of, you're going down the road of solving that problem yourself. So yeah, if we'd talk to you sooner, that'd be great, but we didn't, oh, well, as you go further into it's like, okay, so maybe the time's right. Well, then there's things like the budgets, like, are you really willing to do this because it's going to take some time. It's going to take some work. It's going to take some money. You may not have the staffs. So you may have to actually grow, change, adjust your company. That may be something that would be a blocker. But then if you go further into that, it's things like, okay, so now let's talk about where are you at? Are you in a situation where you, you know, you have, you understand your pain points or are you somebody that just, you know, you have, you know, you hurt, but you don't know where that's going to be where, you know, that may be a differentiator because that's going to, we're going to want somebody that's at least got some idea that we can talk to. And we're going to get further and further down that. Now, granted this, like, you know, you're going to look at these things when you cast your wide net and you're going to say, yeah, I can work with these various people, I can help them, I can do things. But what you really want to do is you want to get to like down that funnel. And you want to get to the people that are like your core. These are the people that are exactly where they want to be at the exact right time, and this is the people I need to talk to. This is where we're going to give them the most value in the shortest period of time. Those are the customers that you're going to try to get down that funnel. Now digitally, I know I've just talked about fun stuff like digitally, there's a lot of different ways you can do that, which is really makes this a miraculous kind of a platform for us to work with. For example, there are always the top of the funnel things out there. There's sites all over the place that are, you know, top of the funnel, loss leaders, things like that. And there are a lot of cool things you can do. You can have, you can do a book, you can have content of some sort. A lot of people are doing some sort of a ranking or a machine or a suggestion device or something like that where they. And you see this all the time on the social sites where it's like, are you Snoopy or are you Woodstock or are you this or are you that? And so what they do is they have you take a quiz or do a little bit of, you know, provide them some information. And then at the end, if you provide them contact information, they will send you something that says, here's how you scored or here is your assessment. There's something that we do in ours is we have some like free assessment stuff. Now I've got the cheaper version or the, to me, the cheaper to build, because I just want to jump to, I want to actually talk to people. I want to actually spend some time and just get to hear their stories about their business, whether they become a client or not. So right away we're going to say, Hey, we'll give you 30 free minutes of, of consultation because we would love to talk to you, maybe useless to us in the long run because it are useless, but it may not be as a customer may never work. Maybe you're in a completely different place, but the conversation is educational to us. And a lot of times we'll make it educational. That's our goal is to make an education to whoever is on the other end. So you have a lot of ways you can do this. And the nice thing about the digital stuff is you can like change it left and right. You can have all kinds of different ways to map that, to get all kinds of statistics around it and really evaluate what works and what doesn't. And you can take this down to, and some places are very good at this, like color selection, word selection, tone, all the fonts. There's like a lot of stuff you can throw into this to figure out how do you really craft and refine your message. And so I think that's the big picture that I wanted to like throw out there. And now I'm going to throw it to Michael and let him sift through some things and let's see where he wants to go with it. Yeah. Thanks Rob. So for me there, I was trying to figure out where funneling came into it. And then you pulled it back. Sometimes it takes a while to get there. Sometimes it's a long bumpy ride. But it's interesting in effect because as you were talking about the funnel, it made me think about a couple of things that kind of came up through that co-starter program I went through last year where yes, we know there are certain things we need, be it a website, be it marketing flyers, things to basically promote the business, tell people who you are. But from a digital sense, those are static, you know, that those are more here. They're out there. You could put ad in a paper. Those are basically, you know, put it out there and I hope people come to you. Now, if you want to be a little more engaging, some of the other interesting techniques I saw, especially through social media, I guess, like TikTok, YouTube, these different video media networks like Instagram is like Rob said, ask, you know, come up with like five questions. Well, if you're new to business or if you're just starting out, go out and just stand on a street corner with the phone and say, Hey, let me ask you a couple of questions and ask their permission. Hey, do you mind if I post this on my social media? Some will say no. Some might say yes, but that's a very interesting way to say, Hey, what do you think of this? And you could almost maybe do like a comedic little post on it. Like they do on like, Oh, what was that show back in the day? A late night show, Jay Leno and David Letterman that they had where they would go out and just talk to people in the street. Do that. Talk to people in the street. If you are just starting out, you don't, you may have an idea of who your customer is. Sure. You can go talk to them. If you can find them, but that's the trick. Who is your customer? You know, like Rob said, what is your why? But the other important question is who are you targeting? You know, like Rob said, are you going after Pokemon people or Dr. Who people, you don't want to really mix the two or go after one or talk to one and not the other. So getting out and talking to people is the first step, but you can do it with social media so you can use your phone and get instant feedback. Now, the other thing you can do is on these channels, you can actually post questions or gamify it with your followers. Say, Hey, I've got an idea for this kind of product. What are some of the suggestions you might like in like X be it, you know, colors, you know, software, you know, what kind of, you know, what is the biggest problem you're struggling with, with tax software, you know, it's tax season. It, you know, what drives you nuts doing your taxes when it comes to technology? You might get a whole slew of answers and it's like, Oh, hey, I got a solution for that. And now you just found a product or another opportunity to promote your company or your product to another customer base. So you need to engage, but you can use social media. You can use digital marketing to do a lot of this. Websites are really good for this, but they are still kind of more static unless you have a full e-commerce site like Amazon. But even then there's a lot of overhead to maintain something like that. And if you're just starting out, you don't really necessarily have a lot of the time to put into that. So you want to kind of keep it simple and keep your message as niche as possible. Like Rob said, you know, you don't want the 10, you want the one. So what you want to do is start funneling those questions when you're out talking to people and you get five or six that are all kind of in this brand or responding in a certain way, but that's not really towards what you're looking for. Tweak your question or ask it slightly differently. And even if you have the same person in front of you that answered it one way, ask them again a different way and see if you get a different response. This is a form of AB testing and it can work for both software and marketing, where you test two different, uh, like web pages, two different marketing styles, two different slogans to see which has more impact on your customer or on the end user. So that's just another way you can kind of branch out to digital market, because with digital it's cheap. You can just throw up a webpage, throw up another webpage, have a little toggle that flips between the two. You don't have to spend the money to print out different flyers or run different marketing ads in a magazine or newspaper to try and sell your product. So use the digital, use the web, use technology to expand your business. Really, there's just so much you can do. But the problem is, and I will warn you this upfront, you will get overwhelmed if that you are new to this. So my suggestion to you, if you're just starting out, pick one or two technologies, be it Facebook, be it LinkedIn, be it YouTube, pick a channel, spend a little bit of time with it, and then add another channel. Don't go out and try to do 20 at once because you're going to get overwhelmed and quit. So two things I want to get into is one is that you can have one of the things that the digital stuff gives you is while you can't have evergreen, you can have stuff that you just put it out there and you let it go and let it run. You also have the opportunity to do regular updates so you can do things where you send an assessment out to people and then you've got the information and maybe a quarter later, a month later, maybe a year later, however it is. You've done some updates. You said, hey, here's an update. We've made some changes and you can either draw them back to your site or you can provide some sort of a, you know, hey, here's an addendum or things like that. You know, maybe it's a book that now you start adding more chapters on, however that goes. So you can build on this as you go. You don't have to have it 100%. You can have, you know, like a book, you could have chapter one and then later come back with chapter two and chapter three and chapter four and keep touching the customer in a way that is like, hey, we're still providing you valuable information and hopefully drawing them closer into you and, you know, maybe even drawing them down that funnel in a sense. Another thing that you can do is one that I completely forgot right now. So I'm going to try to get back to that. So let's see. So you can do the updates. But the other thing she can do, and this is in the, the keeping it simple. It's really, there's so much out there. It is like Michael said, it's really easy to be overwhelmed and you can try something in a, in a channel in sort of a, a silo. And this is the benefit of, you know, one of many benefits of doing one at a time is you can go in there and you can try to win it basically, and make sure that you understand how that community, that, uh, method of, of communication works. And then when you've got a way that you feel you're comfortable with it, then you can expand out and the bonus is then you can take what you've got in your existing community, your existing channel and start to, you know, bleed them over into a new channel and then hopefully draw people that are only in that, you know, that second channel and then you rinse and repeat. So you don't have to do it. You know, you don't have to go a hundred percent. You don't even have to do the 80 20 rule. You can do like 5% in and then just start working that 5% because again, we're not talking in the grand scheme of things. We don't need everybody. If everybody was our customer, okay, that would maybe be okay, but it would possibly be completely overwhelming as well. So we want to, we want to find a way to sort of grow into this in a, in an organic, in a natural way. And that gets us to the challenge this time around. Whatever you, however you are marketing and branding and talking to customers, finding customers right now, whether it's, you know, you may have hundreds of campaigns or you may have nothing. Your challenge this week is to create one thing. And I would say we'll call it like a flyer, like maybe it's a page of information. It could be a one pager. It could be a flyer. It could be just a website with like a one page, whatever it is, it could be in a, you know, a social site. It could be like, say you've never done Facebook. So now you will create a Facebook page. Or maybe it's just a post within that, that is about your company or in some way promotes your company. That's your challenge. And just do it. If you've, if you've done a bunch of these, pick a new place to do it. If it's something that you've started before, then take what you did, refine it, and then put it back out there. Ideally, start fresh, start from scratch. Start from what is my, what is my pitch? What is my focus? What is my brand? And build something with what you know, build something with that, whether it's a flyer, a site, a page, or something like that. If you don't know it, then this is where the challenge is a little more challenging is to start selecting that. Make those choices. Cause a lot of times the choice is not, what you choose is not as important as the fact that you chose, that you made a choice. Sometimes just any direction can be better than, is better than no direction at all. You know, starting off is better than just standing there. And that's not always the case, but in this case, like taking those first steps and starting to think through what is your brand? What is it that makes you, what is your secret sauce? What is your pitch? What is your value proposition? Thinking through that is going to help you quite a bit as you go further into the networking and all the other stuff that is involved in this. One of the things you could do is you can send us an email at info at developer.com. That's sort of like one of our little brandy kind of things is like, send us information because we would love to use it to make us and yourselves better, to make this more entertaining, to make it more informative. You can also leave us information out on contact us on form, developer.com. You can leave us feedback, whether it's the podcast and wherever you get podcasts, whether it's out on the developer channel out there on YouTube, there's a lot of different places we are, wherever you find us, we would love to get the feedback. Positive, negative, whatever it is, whether it's recommendations, whether it's, you know, throwing shade, don't really care because the type, we don't care about it, we just want the feedback because that helps us get better. Whether it's positive or negative criticism, it's going to help us build a better product for you. And that's what we're really looking forward to. That being said, I'm hoping you're looking forward to your day and go out there and have yourself a great day, great week. And we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.