- Speaker #0
We've tested this hundreds, if not thousands of times, that phone numbers in the top right-hand corner on a website on the desktop, or the click-to-call icon on mobile, increase conversion. People don't call as much as they used to. They'd rather text and so on. But having that phone number indicates that you're a real company, and it is a trust symbol. And it is the number one trust symbol on the face of the planet. You're watching Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #1
Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #2
Oh, I get the opportunity to start. Kevin King has given me the opportunity to start this podcast. So, hey, Kev, how's it going?
- Speaker #1
It's going, man. How are you doing? I'm out here. I was out here shoveling snow this morning. You know, our cigar balcony, where when you come to visit. Got polluted with snow. I went out there and there was like a little white patch here, a little white patch there, a little white patch there.
- Speaker #0
That's called,
- Speaker #2
what, fairy pixel or fairy dust. That's nothing. You guys, you shut down, don't you? You guys shut down.
- Speaker #1
We shut down. No, here's the thing about Texas and Austin. The weather forecast on Friday was that Tuesday, because we're recording this on a Tuesday. On Tuesday, there was a chance, like a 50% chance of... precipitation the temperature is going to go below zero degrees Fahrenheit which means it could snow so on Friday they canceled school for Tuesday on Friday they canceled the entire district canceled school for everybody on on Tuesday that's how we are in Texas is we can't handle this in Austin we don't get very much snow I mean this is probably the only time I'll snow this year and maybe it's it might not in the next three years uh so it's a big deal you know sometimes people say it And snow flurries are coming at 4 a.m. People set their alarms and wake up and run out and let the kids that have never seen it before, you know, open up their hands and let it come down on them and go, ooh, look, it's ice coming from the sky. And that's the.
- Speaker #2
As they get hit by a giant snowball.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, it's, you know. But, yeah, so it's we're not like you guys up in the great white north where you dig out of seven inches in front of your seven feet in front of your front door.
- Speaker #2
just to get to your car you see my picture on facebook yeah uh on facebook yeah i did a picture on facebook uh looking out over the lake okay oh yeah the white out the white outfit it was a com and i was talking about like it was it's snow blindness no blindness is real like it was that bright and it didn't really come out in the picture in fact the picture came out almost completely white i had to add blue tones in so people didn't think it was a fake picture but um uh anyways i thought you for one last thing i thought you were in germany no i had to uh not yet not yet in a couple days oh okay i thought you'd left all right so you know what we talk about you always gotta pivot and change and and be on top of things and we talk about this about ai but this has to do with And the reason I'm talking about this is I had a client about a year ago come to me about why his conversion rates had sucked. He had dropped like they were abysmal. They were just they weren't there anymore. And I looked at his site and he was doing fine on Amazon, but his site was actually just terrible. Things change over time. And you have to make sure just like with AI, we have to keep up to date with them. and he had these awful fonts mixed fonts i mean it was probably okay two three four years ago but now people are looking for like a clean user experience so just cleaning up those images changing the fonts a better call to action a better user experience and even customer journey completely different from a few years ago and when we did that We saw an increase of 15% on his website. And it was just a few tweaks. Like there weren't anything massive. And then the other thing we did, when we talked to him, he was just, he was strictly working off of bottom level, like, you know, the bottom of the funnel for conversions. And we changed that a little bit. So we, in his new customer journey, it really did start at top of funnel and we started to try to convert. top of funnel all the way down and we also saw that that was different nowadays so uh anyways i i just wanted to you know tell you a little bit about that because of our guest and uh i don't know if you have anything to say about that but uh usually do
- Speaker #1
That reminds me of that story you were telling me one time when we were smoking cigars about your conversion rate optimization back in the day before you met Connie with the ladies. Or you just changed one little thing, just one little thing, and then you changed the shirt and the conversion rate went right through the roof.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, and showered. If I showered and changed my shirt, I would get much better conversion.
- Speaker #1
I heard about that. So I was like, that reminds me of that cigar story that one night at 3 in the morning you were telling me. But no, conversion, I agree with you. So many people, there's so many little things you can do. It's not rocket science. I mean, there's little tweaks and testing, and that's what our guest today is a master at. And I'm excited to talk to him and learn some stuff because, like you said, that consistency. There's so many people, there's not consistent between the social media ad and the landing page. for example, just little things like that. And that can hurt conversion rate where it's not saying the same message. The colors are different. Like you said, the fonts are off. There's so many things that you can do to increase conversion rate. Sometimes it's just the way, it's the face of the person or the way they're facing or the way the product is, is it to the left or is it to the right? I mean, there's so many little things and I'm sure we're going to go into some really cool detail and some actionable stuff today with Marty.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, so why don't we just get into it? This is a perfect subject. We're going to be talking about conversion rate optimization, or you hear the term CRO quite a bit today. So, and Marty, I hope I'm saying this right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Marty Grief has a career spanning over three decades in various fields, including sales, marketing, and conversion rate optimization, CRO. And he's held executive level positions in several companies. and is currently the president of Sight Tuners. So welcome to the show, Marty. And let me say, this is my other job, Marty. So just a sec.
- Speaker #0
There we go. Well, hello. How are you guys doing?
- Speaker #2
We're doing great.
- Speaker #0
So all good here. So I will correct it. It is Greif as opposed to grief, right? But everybody on the face of the planet, unless they're in Germany, pronounces it incorrectly.
- Speaker #2
All right. Oh, okay.
- Speaker #0
All right. So. All good. Hey, I got to say, I listened to Kevin talking about your conversion rate in your personal life. I've got to make a comment. All right. You didn't know what you were in for when you invited me. OK, no. Let me be clear. What I teach people and when people work with us, they learn techniques. that absolutely makes them a better marketer and a better business person, because we teach them that they are all selfish animals and they're going about things completely incorrectly. And so not only do they become better marketers, they actually become better employees, better bosses, better lovers, hopefully not at work, but in general, all right, by taking The principles of conversion rate optimization, which is the other people matter, it changes your life. And today, hopefully, we're going to change some people's lives and help them make some money.
- Speaker #1
So, what are you saying you need empathy with your customers?
- Speaker #0
You really need to understand who they are, why they're there, and what it is they are really looking to do. Hey, Kevin, can I put you on the spot for a second, buddy?
- Speaker #1
Absolutely.
- Speaker #0
All right, so here's the trick, all right, in a nutshell. Can you describe my hand?
- Speaker #1
Can I describe your hand? Yes, please. You're holding up five fingers. Your palm is facing forward. It's in front of your face. It's close to the camera. I don't have my glasses on because I can't see if you have any marks or anything on your fingers right now. But, yeah, so that's how I would describe it.
- Speaker #0
Interesting. See, I would have said hair, fingernails, knuckles. All right. Which one of us is correct?
- Speaker #1
You were both correct. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
See, conversion rate optimization is all about understanding perspective of your visitors. OK, and being able to understand it to be able to explain what they need to see what you're seeing. And so by understanding both sides of that, that's what makes a difference. And in my team meetings, I can't tell you how many times when people are just talking to each other, I just sit back and go. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, Marty, we know. And they go, so, you know, Jeff, what did you mean when you said this? Oh, okay. And Stacy, did you mean this? Yeah, and they wind up in the right place. It's all about communicating. And that's the whole point of convert rate optimization. So we can be done now. Thanks for your time.
- Speaker #1
Thanks, everybody. See you.
- Speaker #0
See you next week.
- Speaker #1
You got it. Just talk to the hand. No, that's interesting because everybody comes in, everything is, you know, they talk about marketing pre-framing or, you know, and your experience influences your decisions. And that's kind of like, marketing is a battle of perception and perception becomes a reality. in marketing. And that's basically what you're saying is you need to understand where are they coming from or what is their perception and what is their angle. And if you don't know that, it's difficult to sell them. And then today, we'll probably get into this, but in today's world of AI, there's some cool stuff that you can do. I was just thinking off the top of my head on intent-based stuff with AI where you could actually, I was just on a phone call just before this, where they were actually saying that they can actually, you can run a Google ad to your landing page. you know, on say on Shopify, where you can control, you can't do this to Amazon, but you can do it to Shopify. And they can based on they know who you are anonymously. They know that, you know, you just came from this IP address and that the person that lives at that house is, is 62 years old, and they have three cats and two cars and this and they can change the pictures to actually show you on the clothing, show you something that's appropriate for your age on a jacket versus showing you just the general jacket. you know, that might be appropriate for your grandson or for somebody else. And that level of customization is possible now with AI and stuff. So that's conversion rate optimization and effectively trying to hone in or guess what the intent is and what this person really wants and how they view things.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Well, that is absolutely one of the tools that we use, personalization in conversion rate optimization. Okay. But you know what, Kevin? We've been doing that for about 15 years now. Personalization and AI have been around for a lot longer than the latest buzz of a year or so. So we were running personalization tools that actually did dynamic changes on the fly for websites easily 10 years ago. So this is not a new thing within conversion rate optimization. But even if, and I'll go, even if they're not using a tool like that, there's some basic things that you can do on personalization. You know, treat returning visitors differently than new visitors, right? I mean, use an IP address. You know, they're in Texas, you know, versus, you know, in the middle of Canada in the snow doing whatever he's doing. With an IP address, all right, and you welcome, you know, the Canadian, you welcome the Texan, you know, people feel good. And if it says. Did you know that over 3 million Texans use blah, blah, blah every month? All right, now I feel good because it's social proof. I'm in Texas. I'm going to feel good about it. Those are simple things that don't even require AI, but are a level of personalization. Anyway,
- Speaker #1
let's just like an email marketing where you put the, if you, on your customers, you're sending out something, you put their city or you put their name in the subject line or you put their city, you know, in the subject line. 17 people in Austin just bought this. or they have those little things that fly on the bottom of some websites. It looks at your IP address, and it customizes it. It says two people in Texas just bought this recently. Yeah, I've seen that kind of stuff. So when it comes to conversion rate optimization, what are some of the biggest wins that people can get really fast without getting into the weeds or technical or all these little cool little tricks? What is just some fundamental stuff? that people can do that they just don't do?
- Speaker #0
Oh, I can tell you some quick hits that every single visitor or listener can immediately make changes to their website, okay? And I'll not only explain what they are, but I'll tell you why. So if we happen to know for a fact, because we've tested this hundreds, if not thousands of time, that phone numbers in the top right-hand corner on a website on the desktop or the click-to-call icon on mobile increase conversions. Now what's interesting is we always get a lot of pushback, right? Because people are worried about phone calls and wasting people's time. But here's the thing, people don't call as much as they used to, they'd rather text and so on. But having that phone number indicates that you're a real company and it is a trust symbol and it is the number one trust symbol on the face of the planet.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #0
Now, if you don't want to generate lots of calls, and some businesses don't, then when they click on the phone number, it does a drop down, all right? So it's not necessarily pure click to call. It drops down, or instead of having the phone number, you could say... have a phone icon and call a speak with an expert or whatever the right thing is. And it's a dropdown and you can have your hours. You could have, you know, FAQs in there. You could have, you know, you know, looking for your, your order status. So you could actually have other things above and beyond just the phone number in there to minimize some of the phone calls. And we've done that over and over and over again. And it always, always, always increases conversion rates.
- Speaker #2
Okay.
- Speaker #0
Marty number one with, with
- Speaker #2
And showing the phone number, we try to do that as well. I tell people that, and it's the same thing. They just don't get it. But I've experienced this myself numerous times, is that when I call, all of a sudden I get into this voicemail, no return calls. It just becomes frustrating because now you're trying to figure out how to contact them, and it's just a wasted call.
- Speaker #0
Right. So when you have your phone number up there and you have the hours that you actually answer the phone, I don't know. Here's a hint. Answer the freaking phone. OK, it's not that hard. You know, and if you're not going to answer the phone, then you you either get an agency to answer the phone for you. Or if you're going into a voicemail system, make sure that that voicemail system provides love. Make the person feel like they matter. don't make them feel like they just called the cable company. Don't do that. Nobody likes that. So if you've got a voicemail system, and I'll use SiteTuners. We have people answering the phone. But if you call SiteTuners and we didn't have it, I would like you to say, Hi, you've reached SiteTuners. I'm really sorry we couldn't take your call at this moment. However, we would love to help you increase your conversion rate optimization on your site. The best thing to do would be to book an appointment and you can schedule that right online. If you have some other questions that you'd like to talk about in advance, here's a couple options for you. You can send us an email at such and such, such and such. Or you can leave a detailed voicemail. And I promise you that somebody will call back or send you a follow up email. Either way, you are not in the forest by yourself looking at trees going, I'm lost. We're here to guide you out of it. That's the kind of voicemail you leave on your system. All right. Give me some love. Make me feel like I matter.
- Speaker #1
You know what? When you're saying that, I'm thinking in my own head psychologically, because I love the psychology of marketing. I'm thinking like if I saw a phone number, especially if it wasn't an 800 number, if it was like a local area code, call us. That seems even more personal to me than an 800 number. If it is called 323-555-1212. I probably would not call it, but the fact that it's there will give me confidence. And it will give me like, okay. And there's someone in our space that I don't know if you know Perry Belcher in the marketing space. But Perry Belcher, at every talk he does, he gives out, at every presentation he does, he gives out his personal cell phone number. And he's like, this is the phone that rings in my pocket right here. This is not something. And I'm sure he gets blasted with like. everything. But he just did an event, an AI summit, Norm and I were at recently, and he converted almost one third of the room into a $3,000 deal. And I bet the fact that he gave out his phone number in there throughout the presentation actually helped build confidence and trust in him that led to actually more people buying that $3,000. You know, that's now it makes, I was like, why the hell would he ever give out that damn number? And he answers that number. I mean, I text that. That's the number that when I contact him because we do stuff together sometimes. He didn't answer everything, but he does answer that and picks up that phone number. So it's legit.
- Speaker #0
Oh, yeah. Well, let's go back to being authentic matters also. Yeah. Oh, I have to share something. I'm not retired. You know, I bought site tuners about five years ago or so because I was really enjoying this. But the day I retire, the day I retire, if I ever do, okay, I am changing my voicemail to say, hi, you've reached Marty Greif. I'm sorry I missed you. However, recently, I've made some changes in my life. If you leave a message and I don't call you back, you're probably one of them.
- Speaker #1
someday that's what my voicemail is gonna say well my voicemail i get so much spam so much freaking spam like uh that that i actually do not answer my phone um unless i'm directly expecting a call and so my voicemail says that uh i'm uh thanks for calling me uh this is kevin uh i i'm not gonna answer this call and if you leave a message i'm not gonna listen to it I get so much junk that wastes so much of my time that I've even thought about changing my number, having a second number that I actually give out to people that I want to talk to.
- Speaker #0
So Kevin, I would call you once and that would be the end of it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. I mean, but I'm not putting my number out there to do business with. I mean, so I'm not putting, it's not like, it's not on a website somewhere. It's not somewhere where to actually encourage people to call me. But it creates problems sometimes when I got a pizza delivery coming during a football game. They're trying to reach me to say we're downstairs. I'm like, I can't get my phone. I was like, so, but no, that's a, I don't know. It's making me rethink that a little bit, but I'm not trying to convert people.
- Speaker #2
I've told him this a thousand times. He never rethunk it. You know, no rethinking.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Can we go back to what I started with? If you don't look at my principles, it makes you a better. Boss, employee,
- Speaker #1
Marty,
- Speaker #0
and lover, and spouse, and boyfriend,
- Speaker #1
girlfriend. I think you're missing out on- No wonder I can't get any ladies. No wonder I'm having a tough time. Now it's all coming together. Norm, why didn't you tell me this?
- Speaker #2
A thousand times.
- Speaker #1
Why didn't you tell me this? This is why I'm single and solo. No, that's awesome. So you were giving us some quick wins, Marty. One is the phone number. which makes total perfect sense. Yeah. What's another one?
- Speaker #0
So you've got a website and you see a pop-up banner and entry pop. Okay. Now, while we're big fans of pop-ups, we like ones that are in context and ones that are maybe exit pop, but not ones that are entry. Because I don't know who you are on your website yet. I don't know if I want to do business with you. And basically what you're doing is you're doing. Don't do that, okay? It's just a bad, nobody wants to work with that person. So entry pops are rude. And we've had clients say to us, but when we did this entry pop, our subscriptions went up, this went up, that went up. And I go, yes, I believe it. Because here's what that's saying. Your underlying website is so awful that anything will work.
- Speaker #1
but if you put an entry pop on a high converting website your conversions go down not up so it's a band-aid not a solution so anyway and those are the worst on noble because they pop up on you you can't find the little damn x or close button to freaking close them to get them out of the way and i just bounce off oh
- Speaker #0
yeah and that that goes to the other thing i would say is is rotating banners all right frustrating people Because we're literally animals. And we've tested this. Rotating banners like on a homepage, lower conversion rates, 8% to 12%. All right? Now, that assumes you put up a banner that is value-packed and has got your value state and all that. But here's what happens. And I'll exaggerate. Because 50,000 years ago, our ancestors were cave people. And movement was a danger signal. And every time something moved, I'll exaggerate. It's like... What's that? What's that? Right? And it stops us from thinking. It causes cognitive friction and pop ups and and rotating banners all do the following. Imagine that this is the gas tank of patience in your brain. And here's fall. You don't know that I had a wonderful day and I'm happy and I'm happy. You don't know that. I might have had a fight with my spouse and my patience is here. The dog peed on the rug and my patience is here. You know, I argued with Kevin about phone numbers and my patience is here. You have no idea where I am. And every time one of these things happen, you're eating up a little more patience. So don't do these things that basically, what's the technical term? Piss people off. Okay. Rotating banner is bad. Make sure there's a phone number. You know, don't do entry pops. Those are three really obvious things.
- Speaker #2
Can I ask you, I was talking to a well-known web marketing guy, and he told me, this is just about a week or two ago, about banners. And he says, don't sell off the banner. He says, build up the reputation of the product. Let them scroll. Now, this was, I've always learned everything's above the fold. When people come to the site, know what they're buying, get them to click. Now he's saying, so let them scroll down, let them know the benefits and the features, the social sharing, and then the CTR. What do you think about that?
- Speaker #0
I would say he's right. Okay. And so the way we frame that is we tell people that when somebody lands on a website, they ask themselves three questions. Am I in the right place? How do I feel about this site? And what am I supposed to do here? And I need to be able to answer those three questions before I scroll. So am I in the right place? Well, that is highly dependent upon the upstream messaging. But a real simple tip is if on a desktop, for example, if you've got your logo, let's say it's on the left hand side, or maybe it's a fast site, so it's a middle, but right underneath your your logo. have three to six to 10 words to say what you do. So for us underneath our logo site tuners, it says conversion rate optimization. Now, why do we do that? From an SEO perspective, I have no control over what page somebody lands on. So if they land on a blog page or some other page, at least it ties in from our logo, conversion rate optimization and helps frame the entire website. Putting those three to six to 10 words right up on the top is great. Then, in the banner the banner is where your unique value proposition goes why should i buy from you why do i care about you what do you do that that matters to me okay so that goes into am i you know how do i feel about this so am i in the right place we've already done that how do i feel about something you know what you do and you're giving me a value proposition and hopefully you got a phone number so i'm feeling good you've got some some um Some social icons or trust statements or something there. So I feel really good. And then it should be a call to action. And the call to action could be, you know, learn more or shop category or depends on what they are. I'll give you an example. We get these clients that come to us. They're in the SaaS world. And their websites say, get a demo. And I just find out what you do first. Okay. So instead of, you know, and if you need to get a demo, and let's say I'm selling security software, you know, why didn't I say get a demo or speak with a security software expert? Well, that's not threatening, you know, and I'd probably make that the primary call. So if you can answer those three questions before I scroll, and the same thing is true on mobile, you are way, way ahead of the game. And again, we've tested this, you know, I can't tell you how many times. And so whoever you are talking to, he is right on. He or she actually is right on.
- Speaker #2
Very good. What about pricing? That's another frustrating point for me when I want to, something's caught my eye. You've got my attention. I go to pricing and it says, click here for a quote.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Or something like that. I don't put it at all. That's frustrating to me too.
- Speaker #0
Right. This would be like we're on your show right now, okay? And how would you feel if I just wasn't in the camera and I was hiding here talking to you, right, the whole time? You'd probably go, what is he hiding? Is he an ugly looking guy or what's going on with him? You don't hide stuff. I mean, come on. So if you have to hide your pricing, then you're not putting your value proposition there. So we always tell people to display their pricing. Now, having said that, okay, you don't have to display every single plan you've got and all the rest of it. You just got to give people a little bit of the pricing, all right? You don't have to go with it because if you've got complicated pricing structures, are you really going to explain it on your website? Probably not. But you give them something planned starting at this, you know, enterprise plan starting at that. It includes whatever. Yeah, we need to display pricing. Now, if you've got different plans, there is a way to increase your conversions and your average order value and upsell people. And that is called anchoring. So you put the most expensive thing first, less expensive, and so on, because that invokes the fear of missing out. Because people will look at whatever the big number is, and then they don't go, you know, all right, what's this next price? They go. what am I missing out on? What am I losing if I go down, right? If you go cheaper price to higher price, they go, oh, that's more expensive. I'm not comfortable. People don't want to miss out on things. So it's just psychology.
- Speaker #1
What about when it comes to lead capture? There's people that say the conversion rate goes way up if you have a two-part lead capture. So the first one is just ask for the email address and that's it. Make it super easy and then they hit. step two, it's like a two-step process. And then step two is where you actually get their full address and their phone number and whatever else. Do you see that that changes conversion rate by actually having a two-step on the lead capture versus a one-step?
- Speaker #0
So it all depends. Okay. So this goes back. So a lot, and this is the conversations I have so often with clients too. It depends. Sometimes all in one is better. Sometimes the flow is better. It depends. but you what you want to do is tell people what it is they're getting all right and what what the process is because if you surprise people and i put in the email address and then i go to the page that i didn't expect and there's all of these things you know and i i joke about this you know these forms people fill out for legion you know name phone number address company name um uh what did you have for lunch did it make your tummy sit you know i mean it's like Where do you stop with this? All right. You know, it's just too much. So instead, tell people that you're going to be asking these types of questions and tell them why. In order to provide a quote for you, in order to better answer your questions, you know, your input will guide who you speak with, right? Whatever it is, tell me and I'm going to feel better about it. But unfortunately, Kevin, you have to test it and not one size fits all. And that's kind of where CRO also comes in, is testing to find the right combination. Right.
- Speaker #1
A lot of people don't want to give out their real phone number. So to encourage, I think it's Perry Belcher that actually said this, to encourage people to give out their real phone number so that you can SMS them or whatever. As you actually put exactly what you just said, given the reason, people are like, why do they need my phone number? You're just going to call me and try to sell me something. He said he switches it to say for order confirmation or for tracking numbers. We'll text your tracking number to you. or something and people are like oh yeah sure i'm gonna absolutely give you my real phone number uh right here yeah absolutely i agree conversion rates go way up on that yeah i agreed i mean because otherwise if you've got a phone number email and uh and an address so
- Speaker #0
what are you gonna do you're gonna call me and say hey did you get that email and then you're gonna come to my door and knock on the door say i just want to make sure you read the email okay i mean why do you need all that give me a reason right make me feel good make me feel loved and I'll give you what you need.
- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #1
So what is, there's something that you've talked about, I've heard you talk about in the past called greedy marketing syndrome. What is that? Can you explain that to the audience?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, well, actually, you guys semi-defined it. It's the bottom of the funnel where it's buy now, do this. You know, it's the opera school of marketing where it's like, me, me, me, me, it's all about me and I don't care about you. Yeah, don't do that. Instead, what you want to do is get people at different levels of the funnel, the top, the middle, and the bottom. Because if you only focus on the bottom of the funnel and you're trying to push people through any kind of CRO or psychology tactics, what you're doing is you're turning off the 98% of the website visitors who aren't ready to buy. And so greedy marketer syndrome. is where you focus completely on the bottom you focus completely on what it is you want without caring about your visitor in any way shape or form and that's greedy marketer syndrome um i think it's a um i think it's a character floor actually so yeah and when when i if i may what i was going norm why did you invite this guy okay no not at all this is great
- Speaker #2
And one of the things that I had mentioned earlier is starting that customer journey with trying to convert right off of the top. So are you finding that that's more and more coming to be the norm? No pun intended.
- Speaker #0
So I'm going to go back to my favorite answer. It depends. It depends on what it is you're offering. Is it straightforward and obvious, or is it something that is going to take a lot more understanding? So if I'm selling, let's say, a SaaS product that's got peer-to-peer and endpoint technologies, security solutions, I probably have to explain it, even though my audience might understand it, versus would you like a quote for your homeowner's insurance? Okay. Everybody understands, would you like a quote for your homeowner's insurance, all right, for the most part. Not everyone understands the more complicated stuff. And even in the really complicated websites, whether it's, you know, SAS or finance or, you know, pick something complicated, medical, there's different people with different levels of knowledge. You can't assume that everybody understands. So you have to have different entry points for the different types of people. So if I'm selling, you know, for the sake of argument, I'll go back to that SaaS product for a second. I might have technical people from in the IT department, but I also might have a procurement manager looking at this who's not going to have a clue what I'm looking at. Or I might have a lawyer who's looking at our contract and then trying to figure it out. They all have different needs and you need to address the needs of the various visitors. And so Depending upon how complicated what you do is, you can ask either up front or you can guide them down a path that makes sense for them.
- Speaker #2
So that's understanding your audience. But what happens, you were just describing like a technician to somebody that just might be getting some beginner knowledge. So how can you create a funnel that nails?
- Speaker #0
those different people so it like for the beginner it's not too complicated for the technician he goes ah this is for beginners uh i mean it's really a fine line isn't it yeah so it's the goldilocks theory so basically what you do is is you know some people like a hard bed some people like the soft bed someone's like just in the middle so on the on the website you have paths it's almost like signposts it basically say you know for you know for it management go here for accounting services go here for and then they go oh they're talking to me okay and then they go to a page that actually explains in more detail in the language that they are interested in what it is you do now here's where we really get to advanced cro techniques and this will have a lot of people starting to feel ill Because nobody wants to do what I'm going to recommend. All right. And that is whatever your downloadable asset is, whether it's a really informative video, a white paper or whatever it is, do not gate it. Just let the person download it, read it, watch it and so on. And every marketer in the planet will go, but how do we generate our leads if we do that? And the answer is you generate higher quality leads. because people will give you the real phone number and the real email address if instead you give them something of value it's invoking the principle of reciprocity i give you something you now trust me and in that asset whatever it is it then says for more information on xyz go here all right so you've got a couple calls to action and the downloadable are on the web page i trust you now it takes me to another page and it says Norm, or it says, because it doesn't know you yet, if you tell us a little bit about us, we can customize exactly what we can send you. If you can give us your name and an email, we'll send you either this, this, and this. Which one or more of these would you like? All right? Now what's happened? You've gotten their name, you've gotten their email, and they've already started telling you a little bit about what they're interested because they've picked something. Now they're in your drip marketing campaign. We're still not, this is not a sales qualified lead yet. This is a marketing qualified lead. All right. So what are we doing? We're now sending them something because we now know norm is norm. And we go, norm, you know, you downloaded this and this, you know, it turns out that a number of our clients really like this, this, and this also. If you're interested, go here. Okay. And it goes back there. And now we ask them a couple other questions. And we say, so Norm, in your business, do you have, you know, for this kind of product, do you have 10 or more people or 15 people? You know, do you do this? Do you do that? And that's called progressive disclosure. Okay. Because every time I'm giving you something, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about myself because it's all part of a normal conversation with somebody. Right. And so what happens is in the next thing you're going, you now know even more about them. And you offer them more things, but you also offer for them to speak with, buy now. You can give them something that jumps the funnel, right? But if they're not, you've got this drip marketing campaign to the point when they're finally at the end of it. And every industry is different. But when they're finally at the end of it, they'll go, I've been talking to marketing misfits now for six months. I absolutely need these guys on my team. You know what? I'm just going to sign up with them. Or I'm going to make an appointment. appointment with them because they trust you now you always let them jump the funnel but by doing this and providing value and providing progressive disclosure your conversion rate goes way up the number of non-qualified leads goes way down okay and
- Speaker #1
you wind up with more revenue we've done this over and over again that's a great point what about colors and stuff on a site on on these buttons and forms that you're talking about, does it matter or does the wording matter? Does it, do you need to, you know, in the old days, it made sure, like, make sure every hyperlink's always in blue, not in another color, or make sure that the buttons that they're pushing are yellow or orange, because if they're red means stop and blue means go or whatever. Is there anything that, like that, that matters that you're seeing when you're helping people at SiteTuners optimize?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so... contrast matters more than the color. It needs to pop off the page. So green, blue, red, yellow, pink, whatever the right color is, right? And that's based on their palette. And so just to say, orange is the color. No. Okay. Contrast matters, but words matter also. So for example, How many times have you seen a button where it says submit, right? Yeah. Well, submit's a bad word. We've tested it. 99 times out of 100, it fails compared to please send me my quote, please schedule an appointment, please whatever, which is more benefit-oriented, action-oriented. The only time submit works is if your visitors or fans of the book Fifty Shades of Grey, but other than that, nobody likes the word submit. Okay? It's a bad freaking word. What? You're laughing at me. I'm dead serious,
- Speaker #1
guys. No, no, it's dead serious when you think about it. It is.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, Kevin hits the submit button quite a bit.
- Speaker #1
That's my favorite.
- Speaker #0
Yeah,
- Speaker #1
that makes me more nervous. No, I used to do that. In fact, my background is direct marketing. Before this whole Internet thing, I was selling through direct mail, and I used to do that on all my order forms. If I was selling, I don't know, I was selling a kitchen gadget. It would on the older form and actually had a little box like one of those zap dingbats You know, you can make the little that font you can make the little box and so they could check it and it says Please send me my XYZ kitchen gadget and then below that would be all the it's reconfirming the sale and it's reconfirming It's almost the submit button. Yeah, it's not it's not necessary at all. They can just put in their name and address Here's where I ship it to and here's fill out the the shipping and tax or whatever and send off the check of money order but by putting that there, an increased conversion rate.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, of course. The tactics may have changed, a piece of mail versus a forum or a website, but the strategies behind that are still the same. Strategies don't necessarily change. Strategies are how you think about your business, how you think about your clients. Your tactics, you know, if I advertise on Facebook versus in the paper in the old days versus direct mail, those are tactics. But the strategy is... live on.
- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
That's right. Stack Influence pushes high volume external traffic sales straight to Amazon listings using micro influencers that you only have to pay with your products.
- Speaker #2
They've helped Up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products.
- Speaker #1
Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description or notes below and mention Misfits, that's M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. stack influence.com so what about the strategy of in the old days in direct mail there was there were stickers so you would you would get a magazine to subscribe to a magazine or to get something you had to take the little yes sticker and it would peel off and you would peel that off the order the letter or something and you stick it stick it on the actual postcard or the order form to mailing in you That increased conversion rates like crazy for a lot of direct mail pieces of done right. How do you do that same concept or that same strategy online?
- Speaker #0
You're getting engagement. So it's basically getting engagement. If someone is going to spend time with you and they're going to do the sticker on the form, they are engaged in the process. All right. So how do you engage people on a website? You give them enough information to go from thing to thing to thing. And this is why if you look at Universal Analytics versus GA4, how we've moved from bounce rates and stuff to more like engagement rates over time, engagement is now the metric. Are people actually engaging with the website, engaging with the company? And so we look at that as just almost a direct example to what you're talking about. Are they engaged? Are they following the path? Are they keeping going on? Because on the stickers, you know, there were people who went, you know, they put one down and they went, you know what? They decided not to. And there's a couple put a couple down, but they didn't put the check in. You know, there's different stages and you want to keep giving people engagement steps so that they continue on to whatever the final thing is up on your up on your your website. Does that make sense, Kevin?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that are good at marketing, maybe at getting people to the page, but that's where they stop. There's so many people don't know how to optimize the page once they got on there. And you see this over and over. You see it on Amazon where you don't have as much control as you do on your own website. But where people are getting massive clicks or they're spending a lot of money, but then they just can't convert them. And I think more people need to pay attention to and spend time on. optimizing for conversion rather than making some finessing their images or the graphic or something like that.
- Speaker #0
And this is why we're in business. And we're quite happy about that. As a matter of fact, 50% of our revenue comes from other agencies because we're not competitive with them. But what we do makes them look really good.
- Speaker #2
So let's talk about engagement on a website. There's certain things you can do. You can have your chat bot. running and you can get people to start asking questions and getting the answers right away. What are some other things that people can do to engage while they're on a website?
- Speaker #0
They can watch a video and hopefully watch it to the end. They can fill out a form that's considered engagement. They could go from page to page to page within a website. They can read a long article, which takes them. 10 minutes to read, all right, and they scroll down to the bottom. That's engagement. So there's multiple things that Google sees as signs for engagement, time on site, number of pages visited, actions taken. Those are all engagement metrics.
- Speaker #1
And you mentioned, kind of just real quick, I wanted to clarify, you said it a few minutes ago. Can you explain for the audience? I think you said some terminology there that everybody listening might not get. You said everything went from the old way that you see. to the GA4 way. Can you explain what that is? I mean, I understand it, but can you explain for the audience what that is?
- Speaker #0
Okay. So universal analytics, which, you know, there's pluses and minuses to everything in this world, but universal analytics was relatively easy to use. And it was a way to set up and capture your metrics as well as report on it. Where GA4 now is more of a reporting mechanism, And when you're setting it up correctly, you're actually setting up the triggers up in the Google Tag Manager to fire off and then you're doing the reporting. So, Universal Analytics is more of a, I'm sorry, GA4 is more of a reporting tool where UA was more of an all-in-one. But they also changed, you know, from what was important on metrics there and engagement became a much more, uh important metric than in the old days bounce rate as a matter of fact when ga4 first came out it didn't even offer bounce rate you had to kind of create it on your own to do it i think it's back in there now because people got lost but but you know the the mechanisms on how you set it up how you trigger the key events you know and how you do reporting have all changed from from ua to j4 now You know, I used UA for Universal Analytics for forever, right? Or at least it felt like it. I think dinosaurs roamed the earth when I first used it, right? And so, but now, you know, we all, you're smiling, but it's true. But now, you know, for the past, you know, year, a couple of years, you know, we had to transition to GA4. And now on my team, I have people that actually set up the tag manager correctly, because I can't tell you how many times we have things fired multiple times. People fire it in Tag Manager, and then they somehow manage to embed code on their websites, and things are double-counted, not counting at all, doing all sorts of wacky things, okay? So it's a little bit more complicated. It requires a little bit more technical know-how, but when done right, you can get nice reports out of it. So as opposed to in the old days with, I'll go a step further, with UA, you could get reports out of it, but... they could make your eyes roll in your head and you could film at the mouth, right? So we would use, you know, Looker Studio, okay, or Data Visual Studio at the time, to actually create reports that people could comprehend, right? And now we're able to do a little bit more of that within GA4 itself.
- Speaker #2
That's when I first started losing my hair, looking at those reports.
- Speaker #0
That's what happened.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. And by the way, you said dinosaur, they call me the fossil. So that's...
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #2
Now, let's talk a little bit about tools,
- Speaker #0
apps.
- Speaker #2
Are there any low-cost apps or no-cost tools that small businesses can use?
- Speaker #0
Oh, absolutely. The number one free app that people should use. is Clarity, Microsoft Clarity. It is a heat mapping tool. It does a lot of really good things on it. For years, for people who were looking for paid versions of things, we used Hotjar and Lucky Orange and so on, and they're all good products, but if someone's at the lower end of the spectrum, then they could use Microsoft Clarity to do a lot, maybe not all, but a lot of the same things. It's a pretty decent tool. Now, in fairness, unless you've got massive traffic, even Hotjar is not that expensive. And Hotjar has some other things that are good in it that Clarity may not have. Now, in the old days, I go back to the old days, you know, back when I used to walk uphill to school. Now, in the old days, Google Optimize was a free testing tool, you know, and now they had a paid version, but a lot of our clients use Google Optimize. And so, Since then, that went away. And I'm sure Google at some point will come back with a new version. But there's a ton of really good testing tools out there. And if you're testing, you could use anything from, you know, at the lower cost from like OmniConvert or Convert or maybe Tasty or VWO. Well, VWO can start to get expensive. The trick is those are all charging based on session. So here's the thing. For small businesses, if you don't have a lot of volume, it's really hard to test. And here's the testing rule of thumb. To really run testing, you need to have 10 conversion actions per day, per device type, meaning desktop versus mobile, and in a perfect world, per channel. because organic traffic is different than paid traffic versus social traffic and so on so if you think about what does it take to get 10 sales a day or 10 leads a day where the 10 leads let's say came from your desktop on your pay-per-click channel you need that minimum and then your test is going to run for almost a month before it resolves out all right and so If you don't have those kinds of volumes, your tests will run, never get to statistical significance. And then what do you do? So you can test on what we call micro conversions, which is they get from one page to the next page. So they're on your page where it says, you know, book an appointment. They click on that button to book an appointment, and then they don't fill out the form. But you know, you're getting more people over to that page, you know, and then you get more people starting to fill out the form. And then you get more people hitting submit. Those are micro conversion steps along the journey. And most people have micro conversions that they can test. And you can do that, right, with getting to statistical significance. But again, it really should be, well, it has to be per device type, right? And in a perfect world, per channel, okay? Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #1
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #1
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #0
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Let's focus on clarity. We'll give you those tools, a hot jar. That's more than just heat mapping. They'll actually give you these statistics. Do they actually do swap outs of like AB testing?
- Speaker #2
No, no, no. No, those are going to require the testing tools like the convert. So what the heat mapping and recording tools do, we'll let you look at the data to figure out what people are doing. So, for example, on heat mapping tools, if you look at the recordings on a heat map tool, when somebody comes to your site and they don't scroll and they just leave, whatever you said there didn't match the user intent up front. If they scroll down to the page at the bottom and they leave, whatever you said wasn't interesting or compelling enough. If they scroll down and then up and then down and up and they leave, whatever they were looking for, they didn't find. OK. And so there's different tricks to look at these heat maps and recordings to figure out, like, why are people abandoning? What are they actually doing here? And so analyzing heat maps and recordings in itself is kind of a science. Sorry. And you can get quite away with. just using those types of tools.
- Speaker #1
What about trends? What do you see for online sellers? What should they be looking at?
- Speaker #2
I'm going to go back to engagement. If people are not engaged on your site, sooner or later, you're going to wind up in trouble. You have to make whatever you're offering compelling. So we had a client who, and again, this is not normal case, but we had a client where we increase their revenue by 1000% within six months, okay. And we turn them into a multi multi million dollar business by increasing the engagement so that people would actually go from step one to step two to buy right now in fairness, why didn't why are those results not normal? You know, they're the before if I showed you the before their website, it literally looked like who did it and ran it was awful. Right. So a blind monkey could have made it better. Right. But we got him to, like I said, be a multimillion dollar company because we applied all of those engagement things to get people to go through the funnel from start to finish.
- Speaker #1
All right. So, Kev, do you have any other questions?
- Speaker #0
Not off the top of my head right now. This has been really, really good.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. a lot of information so marty i gotta ask you at the end of every podcast we always ask our guests our misfit if they know a misfit you mean besides me you don't want me back again is that what you say i'll have you back again we'll be back again yeah i'm hurt oh my god right now
- Speaker #2
submit all right so anyway uh i have a friend uh who runs an agency called fire and spark his name is dale bertrand okay although you know i talked about him a little bit before uh he's not french it's not my tongue you know that's how it is it's it's the version and he is with fire and spark he and i went through heroic public speaking together and uh learned how to speak in front of large audiences although he was already doing a lot of that and uh he has actually been a keynote speaker at inbound for hubspot in front of 12 000 people so He is an amazing, amazing speaker and he's brilliant. And he is he is very, very knowledgeable about SEO conversions and AI. He is he and I just had a conversation the other day about using AI for different things. I got to tell you, my hat's off to Dale. He is freaking brilliant. So and a nice guy. So yeah,
- Speaker #1
but not French. Okay.
- Speaker #0
And that was SiteTuners. If people want to know more too, right, it's sitetuners.com, right?
- Speaker #2
Yep, sitetuners.com. And, you know, they can read about us, they can sign up for an appointment if they're generating $5 million a year or more in revenue. We're more than happy to do a free consultation where we tell them what to change on their website. We believe you give before you get. And if I can teach people how to make more money, they typically do this for free.
- Speaker #1
imagine what happens if we pay them or you can hit that little symbol of a phone up in the top right corner and you can call and they will and they will schedule an appointment because that's what I mean them to do all right Marty well thanks a lot for coming on I am just gonna remove you we'll be right back to you okay that's
- Speaker #0
my other job okay do your job pretty well over there though I'm getting better at it you know you can like hit that button uh yes No, you're getting better and better at it.
- Speaker #1
You know, instead of removing...
- Speaker #0
I'm not getting kicked off anymore when you hit the button. I'll believe you.
- Speaker #1
Just a sec here. Okay, so I think I'm getting really great at this. Now, this is how I take over a podcast. Yeah, yeah. The only thing that would be better is if the remove button would be...
- Speaker #2
There you go.
- Speaker #1
That's the word of the day.
- Speaker #0
Oh, no. Now, every time I see that submit, I'm going to be like... And we think of like Norm, like Norm hitting submit. No, no, that's just a bad thought in my head.
- Speaker #1
Oh, I could say things. I won't.
- Speaker #2
I won't. I won't.
- Speaker #1
All right, Mr.
- Speaker #0
Kev. It's something that a lot of people don't spend enough time on or they don't get help with. I mean, that's where site tuners, I mean, sometimes it's just simple things that you just. You're just blind to or you don't know or you don't think about. And by going to someone like Marty and the guys at SiteTuners, it could make a big difference. Just like they gave the example of the site that was just doing okay and they took them to millions of dollars just by making some tweaks and jazzing it up with the right stuff.
- Speaker #1
Can you imagine? I mean, we're talking tweaks, just understanding the process. That's the incredible thing. And even just talking CRO, a lot of people... Just before Marty came on, I was just telling him that we haven't really talked about that, and I don't see a lot of podcasts talking about that, that side of the strategy or strategies. But anyways, how can people get a hold of us?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, if you like this episode with Marty, make sure you actually check out some of the other episodes of Marketing Misfits here on this channel. If you're watching on YouTube, there's plenty of other ones around that you might want to check out. Go back and look at last week's or hit that subscribe button if you want to make sure you don't miss any. Any of them. We have a new one that comes out every single Tuesday, like Clockwork. So be sure to check those out and hit subscribe. If you listen to this on Apple or podcast or Spotify, subscribe to us there. And sometimes, you know, you might want to actually check us out on YouTube as well, because on YouTube, you can actually see our smiling faces and see it. When Norm, he winks at me, you know, you can see it quite often,
- Speaker #1
actually.
- Speaker #0
too much it's too much I wish I had a button doesn't say submit yeah I can imagine marketing misfits dot oh man is it dot-com or I can never get this right norm it's dot-com one of these days I thought I was the fossil it's dot-com CEO marketing no m.co and look for some cool stuff announcing soon Something called Dragonfish. I don't know what that is. Do you know what that is, Norm? You ever heard of something called Dragonfish?
- Speaker #1
I do, but I have taken an oath of secrecy until we launched it.
- Speaker #0
The fifth. Okay. All right. You don't have that in Canada. You don't have a fifth in Canada, do you?
- Speaker #1
No, no, no. Don't even get me started.
- Speaker #0
All right, everybody. We'll see you again next week for another episode. It's been great hanging with you. Thanks for coming and joining us here on the marketing misfits.
- Speaker #1
See you later.
