Detailed Notes
In this episode of the Building Better Developers podcast, hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche share actionable insights on digital marketing for small businesses. Part of their Building Better Businesses season, the episode explores how to create marketing that connects, converts, and scales — especially for developer-entrepreneurs building tech-forward brands.
Read More: https://develpreneur.com/how-to-succeed-with-digital-marketing-for-small-businesses/
*Your Challenge: Start or Improve Your Digital Marketing Today*
Create just one piece of marketing content this week. It could be a flyer, a one-page website, or a single social media post that clearly explains who you are, what you offer, and who you help.
Digital marketing for small businesses doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with one step, test it, learn, and grow.
*Additional Resources*
* Creating your Marketing Site (https://develpreneur.com/creating-marketing-site/) * Online Communities and Marketing (https://develpreneur.com/online-communities-and-marketing/) * Amazon Pinpoint Targeted Marketing Made Easy (https://develpreneur.com/amazon-pinpoint-targeted-marketing-made-easy/) * Memorable Marketing – Find Ways To Stick In Your Customer’s Mind (https://develpreneur.com/memorable-marketing-find-ways-to-stick-in-your-customers-mind/)
*Follow-us on:*
* https://develpreneur.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZOuFN_LhczvGyT2KSItH_g/featured * https://facebook.com/Develpreneur * https://twitter.com/develpreneur * http://linkedin.com/develpreneur
Transcript Text
[Music] Hey, we're back. All right, diving right in. Uh, web stuff, SEO stuff, contentbased stuff. I got a lot of stuff on my mind that I can do with that. So, we're just going to dive into it and just see where the heck this one goes. We're going to do a little three, two, well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of building better businesses, but actually, we are building better developers. We're developer because that is our focus is where developers and entrepreneurs meet right here at this podcast hopefully. So, if this is what you were looking for, you're here. You found it. And if it's not, you found it anyways. You also found myself. I'm Rob Broadhead. I'm one of the founders of too much finding in that. One of the founders of developer and building better developers. Also a founder of RB Consulting where we we help you just like wrangle that technology sprawl that is 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. uh including whether that t technology is uh something you buy off the shelf through 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, good thing, bad. This is an interesting good thing, bad thing. So, this will 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 40t 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 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 things were like, well, you could do this better and you could do that better. So I did. So we like jacked up the house a little better, straightened everything out, 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, you know, 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, when it's being sold, people see that and they're 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 Malash. I'm one of the co-founders of developer bu building better developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we work with small to mid-size businesses who are struggling with their software, struggling with their technology stack. Uh 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-ter. Let's see, good thing, bad thing. Uh good thing um 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. Uh the good thing about that though was a month before all this weather hit out of the blue. Uh 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 it was 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 uh 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 uh hopefully evergreen that they are great for create hitting a customer when they want to find you. So they're 24/7 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 them. Now, that's the thing about these these marketing approaches. I'm not going to get deep into like 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 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 um 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. 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 take a step back and think about and this goes back to like we've talked about it so many times. It's sort of your why, but it's also what is the problem that you are solving for your customer. uh one of the interviews I did way back uh I think it was an interview it may have even been with a customer a customer interview that I did but uh 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 gonna be some number of either questions or problems that is like very This is where we niche down a bit a little bit is that we say, "Well, this is the 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, Doctor Who synopsis was, well, you're not gonna 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 things like that comes in, is this 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 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 they only have two people working in it. 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. Cuz 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 crossrain 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 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? are 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 talked to you sooner, that'd be great, but we didn't. Oh well. As you go further into it, it's like, okay, so maybe the time is right. Well, then there's things like the budget. It's 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 staff, so you may have to actually grow, change, adjust your company. Um, 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. 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 funnel stuff like digitally, there's a lot of different ways you can do that, which is really makes this a a miraculous kind of a 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 uh you can do a book, you can have content of some sort. A lot of people are doing some sort of a 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. This is something that we do and 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 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." may be useless to us in the long run because it or not 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 it educational 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 stat 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 sip through some things and let's see where he wants to go with it. Yeah. Thanks, Rob. So for a minute 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 it's interesting in effect because as you were talking about the funnel, it made me think about a couple things that uh kind of came up through that co-starter uh 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 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 uh social media, I guess like Tik Tok, uh YouTube, these different video uh 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 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 um oh what was that show back in the day? Um late night show uh Jay Leno and David Letterman the 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 who your customer is. Sure you can go talk to them uh 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 Doctor 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 gify 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 uh problem you're struggling with with tax software you know it's tax season 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 uh solution for that and now you just found a product or another opportunity to promote your uh 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. Uh websites are really good for this. Uh 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 h 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 through digital marketing because with digital it's cheap. You can just throw up a web page, throw up another web page, 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 have evergreen, you can have stuff that you just put it out there and you're let it go and let it run, you also have the opportunity to do regular updates. So, you can do things where you, you know, you 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 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. Um, so you can do the updates. Uh, but the other thing you can do and and this is in the the keeping it simple. Um, 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, 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 you 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 100%. You don't even have to do the 8020 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 thing, 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 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 like we'll call it like a flyer. Like maybe it's a page of information. It could be a one pager. Um 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 promote 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 know 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 because 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. 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 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 can do is you can send us an email at [email protected]. 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, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Bonus material. So, I was thinking about this a little bit. So, with the kind of like AB testing or like digital marketing, one of the things as you're building your business or you're growing your business, you could already be established. One of the best ways to tell if you're attracting the wrong type of customer is, as Rob said, if everyone was our customer, that might be a great thing, but it might not be a good thing. If you are getting too many bad customers, and I mean bad customers are customers that actually take more time to service than it costs you to make money. So basically, they're costing you money to sell your product to them. Look at your marketing strategy and figure out how you can tweak your communication, tweak your mission, tweak your advertising in a way that may not be as appealing to those type of customers, but more in line with the type of customers that are your happy customers, are your, you know, the customers you want to work with, that really enjoy your product or your service. Bonus. bonus bonus. So I think that this goes back to the funnels and things like that is I think this is a way I have found that that thinking about those is a various funnels is a great way to take a a diverse offering and drill it down into something very niche. So for example, let's say like the pillars that I talk about on a regular basis. Simplification, automation, integration, and now innovation. Those are each funnels of themselves is that there's like there are companies out there that are just looking for there going to be customers out there they they just want to simplify what they have. So there's the simplification funnel. There is the integration funnel that a lot of companies are like, we've got a lot of crap, then we need to make it talk to each other. So that's where that funnel comes in. And let's just take those two. So the simplification discussion is different from the integration discussion. There's there's different problems. There's different facets. Now it does all distill into the process that we use of basically we learn your business. We learn our customers business and then we find ways to leverage our experience and all of the different ways we've used technology and then recommend for them, you know, craft that unique approach. So whichever funnel they come in, what we're going to do is we're going to actually bring them down to this is the proposition that we're going to give you is that we're not really in a sense we may draw you in through simplification and say you've got a lot of stuff and we're going to find a way to you know simplify what you have. Funny enough integration is also going to simplify at some point. Uh even innovation is things where we may say, you know, you got all this stuff, but let's craft like let's take all these things that you're doing and instead we're going to build you a custom solution that's going to take the best of breed of all of those. Yeah, it may be a little more expensive, but in the long run it probably won't and it and then you own it and you nobody else has it. So there's a lot of value there. any of those ways that you get through all come back to the same thing of really getting to know the customer helping them craft their roadmap for technology. So all those tech those things that are out there you can think of those as separate funnels which also means you can take for example the five questions I talked about during the the podcast of the one customer said well there's these five questions each question could be its own little funnel so you can have which in a digital world it's really easy to have a site that is like answer question one.com this is what you want on question two.com you know things like that. So, you can you can build these one-offs. And we played around with this for a while with the school.developer.com where we would spin up that was part of our our personal challenge as we were building this stuff is to build essentially a a a topic funnel. It all went into the school, but we had all of these little funnels out there. And if you went to the school, you could see all of our stuff and do everything, but we also had these funnels that were trying direct traffic in based on a specific thing. So, don't be afraid to, and this is really in the, you know, the bonus material is don't be afraid to like take one of those. Spend a little time with it and then it could stay up. It could still be there. It could still be valuable because it's a honey trap of some sort for some type of customer, but now take it and say, you know what, maybe this could be improved. And now you go create another one. And maybe now you're reaching out to a different set of customers. I know I'm getting a little deep on that and it's but it's one of those if you ever, like I said, you can choose an email. I would we can talk about it. We'll bring you on the We will bring you on the show and interview if you want because that would actually be a pretty fun little conversation. What's not so much fun is saying goodbye. Tears, tears, tears. It's too much. Uh it's not really uh cuz we're going to see you again because this is not goodbye. This is not even farewell. This is until next time. This is go fill your coffee or your adult beverage or whatever it is and then come back around and you will see our shining faces in no time. However, do go out there, have yourself a great time, have a good day, a good week, a good month, the rest of the year even, and we will talk to you next time. Have a good one, guys. [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
Hey, we're back. All right, diving right
in.
Uh, web stuff, SEO stuff, contentbased
stuff. I got a lot of stuff on my mind
that I can do with that. So, we're just
going to dive into it and just see where
the heck this one goes. We're going to
do a little three,
two, well, hello and welcome back. We
are continuing our season of building
better businesses, but actually, we are
building better developers. We're
developer because that is our focus is
where developers and entrepreneurs meet
right here at this podcast hopefully.
So, if this is what you were looking
for, you're here. You found it. And if
it's not, you found it anyways. You also
found myself. I'm Rob Broadhead. I'm one
of the founders of too much finding in
that. One of the founders of developer
and building better developers. Also a
founder of RB Consulting where we we
help you just like wrangle that
technology sprawl that is 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. uh
including whether that t technology is
uh something you buy off the shelf
through 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, good thing, bad. This is
an interesting good thing, bad thing.
So, this will 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
40t 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 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 things were like, well,
you could do this better and you could
do that better. So I did. So we like
jacked up the house a little better,
straightened everything out, 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, you know,
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, when it's being
sold, people see that and they're 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 Malash.
I'm one of the co-founders of developer
bu building better developers. I'm also
the founder of Envision QA where we work
with small to mid-size businesses who
are struggling with their software,
struggling with their technology stack.
Uh 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-ter. Let's see, good thing, bad
thing. Uh good thing um 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. Uh the
good thing about that though was a month
before all this weather hit out of the
blue. Uh 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 it was 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 uh
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
uh hopefully evergreen that they are
great for create hitting a customer when
they want to find you. So they're 24/7
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 them.
Now, that's the thing about these these
marketing approaches. I'm not going to
get deep into like 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 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 um 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. 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 take a step back and think
about and this goes back to like we've
talked about it so many times. It's sort
of your why, but it's also what is the
problem that you are solving for your
customer.
uh one of the interviews I did way back
uh I think it was an interview it may
have even been with a customer a
customer interview that I did but uh
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 gonna be
some number of either questions or
problems that is like very This is where
we niche down a bit a little bit is that
we say, "Well, this is the 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, Doctor Who
synopsis was, well, you're not gonna
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 things
like that comes in, is this 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 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 they
only have two people working in it. 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. Cuz 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
crossrain 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 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? are 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 talked to you sooner, that'd be
great, but we didn't. Oh well. As you go
further into it, it's like, okay, so
maybe the time is right. Well, then
there's things like the budget. It's
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
staff, so you may have to actually grow,
change, adjust your company. Um, 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. 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 funnel stuff
like digitally, there's a lot of
different ways you can do that, which is
really makes this a a miraculous kind of
a 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 uh
you can do a book, you can have content
of some sort. A lot of people are doing
some sort of a 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. This is something that we do
and 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 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." may be
useless to us in the long run because it
or not 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 it
educational 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 stat 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 sip
through some things and let's see where
he wants to go with it. Yeah. Thanks,
Rob.
So for a minute 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
it's interesting in effect because as
you were talking about the funnel, it
made me think about a couple things that
uh kind of came up through that
co-starter uh 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 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 uh social media,
I guess like Tik Tok, uh YouTube, these
different video uh 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 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 um oh what was that show
back in the day?
Um late night show uh Jay Leno and David
Letterman the 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 who your
customer is. Sure you can go talk to
them uh 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 Doctor 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 gify
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
uh problem you're struggling with with
tax software you know it's tax season
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 uh solution for
that and now you just found a product or
another opportunity
to promote your uh 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. Uh
websites are really good for this. Uh
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 h 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 through digital
marketing because with digital it's
cheap. You can just throw up a web page,
throw up another web page, 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 have evergreen, you can
have stuff that you just put it out
there and you're let it go and let it
run, you also have the opportunity to do
regular updates. So, you can do things
where you, you know, you 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 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. Um, so you can do
the updates. Uh, but the other thing you
can do and and this is in the the
keeping it simple. Um, 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, 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 you 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 100%. You
don't even have to do the 8020 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 thing, 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 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 like
we'll call it like a flyer. Like maybe
it's a page of information. It could be
a one pager. Um 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
promote 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 know 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 because 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. 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 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 can do is
you can send us an email at
[email protected]. 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, a
great week, and we will talk to you next
time. Bonus
material.
So, I was thinking about this a little
bit. So, with the kind of like AB
testing or like digital marketing, one
of the things as you're building your
business or you're growing your
business, you could already be
established.
One of the best ways to tell if you're
attracting the wrong type of customer
is, as Rob said, if everyone was our
customer, that might be a great thing,
but it might not be a good thing. If you
are getting too many bad customers, and
I mean bad customers are customers that
actually take more time to service than
it costs you to make money. So
basically, they're costing you money to
sell your product to them.
Look at your marketing strategy and
figure out how you can tweak
your communication, tweak your mission,
tweak your advertising in a way that may
not be as appealing to those type of
customers, but more in line with the
type of customers that are your happy
customers, are your, you know, the
customers you want to work with, that
really enjoy your product or your
service. Bonus. bonus bonus. So I think
that this goes back
to the funnels and things like that is I
think this is a way I have found that
that thinking about those is a various
funnels is a great way
to take a a diverse offering and drill
it down into something very niche. So
for example, let's say like the pillars
that I talk about on a regular basis.
Simplification, automation, integration,
and now
innovation. Those are each funnels of
themselves is that there's like there
are companies out there that are just
looking for there going to be customers
out there they they just want to
simplify what they have. So there's the
simplification funnel. There is the
integration funnel that a lot of
companies are like, we've got a lot of
crap, then we need to make it talk to
each other. So that's where that funnel
comes in. And let's just take those two.
So the simplification discussion is
different from the
integration discussion. There's there's
different problems. There's different
facets. Now it does all distill
into the process that we use of
basically we learn your business. We
learn our customers business and then we
find ways to leverage our experience and
all of the different ways we've used
technology and then recommend for them,
you know, craft that unique approach. So
whichever funnel they come in, what
we're going to do is we're going to
actually bring them down to this is the
proposition that we're going to give you
is that we're not really in a sense we
may draw you in through simplification
and say you've got a lot of stuff and
we're going to find a way to you know
simplify what you have. Funny enough
integration is also going to simplify at
some point. Uh even innovation is things
where we may say, you know, you got all
this stuff, but let's craft like let's
take all these things that you're doing
and instead we're going to build you a
custom solution that's going to take the
best of breed of all of those. Yeah, it
may be a little more expensive, but in
the long run it probably won't and it
and then you own it and you nobody else
has it. So there's a lot of value there.
any of
those ways that you get through all come
back to the same thing of really getting
to know the customer helping them craft
their roadmap for technology. So all
those tech those things that are out
there you can think of those as separate
funnels which also means you can take
for example the five questions I talked
about during the the podcast of the one
customer said well there's these five
questions each question could be its own
little funnel so you can have which in a
digital world it's really easy to have a
site that is like answer question
one.com this is what you want on
question two.com you know things like
that. So, you can you can build these
one-offs. And we played around with this
for a while with the
school.developer.com where we would spin
up that was part of our our personal
challenge as we were building this stuff
is to build essentially a a a topic
funnel. It all went into the school, but
we had all of these little funnels out
there. And if you went to the school,
you could see all of our stuff and do
everything, but we also had these
funnels that were trying direct traffic
in based on a specific thing.
So, don't be afraid to, and this is
really in the, you know, the bonus
material is don't be afraid to like take
one of those. Spend a little time with
it and then it could stay up. It could
still be there. It could still be
valuable because it's a honey trap of
some sort for some type of customer, but
now take it and say, you know what,
maybe this could be improved. And now
you go create another one. And maybe now
you're reaching out to a different set
of customers. I know I'm getting a
little deep on that and it's but it's
one of those if you ever, like I said,
you can choose an email. I would we can
talk about it. We'll bring you on the We
will bring you on the show and interview
if you want because that would actually
be a pretty fun little
conversation. What's not so much fun is
saying goodbye. Tears, tears, tears.
It's too much. Uh it's not really uh cuz
we're going to see you again because
this is not goodbye. This is not even
farewell. This is until next time. This
is go fill your coffee or your adult
beverage or whatever it is and then come
back around and you will see our shining
faces in no time. However, do go out
there, have yourself a great time, have
a good day, a good week, a good month,
the rest of the year even, and we will
talk to you next time. Have a good one,
guys.
[Music]