Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. We are really excited for our first episode here and to get into the topic of proven marketing ideas for small businesses.

[00:00:17] Kevin Dieny: I am joined by two illustrious guests, the first one I have with me today is Matt Widmyer, he’s the sales development manager at CallSource. He oversees the ever-growing sales development division here while working as a liaison between the marketing and sales departments. Whether this is an individual or a team’s operational gaps that he’s facing, he’ll roll up his sleeves and he’ll go to work. He is a problem solver, he’s a mentor, and he is a coach, all rolled into one. Matt has a wife and daughter and loves all things outdoors.

[00:00:50] Matt Widmyer: Hi everybody.

[00:00:53] Kevin Dieny: Matt and I have known each other for a few years, so he kind of represents our sales side and we the marketing side. It’s always great conversations we get into. I’m also joined by Ronn Burner. Ronn Burner is an independent marketing strategy consultant. He appliances marketing and an MBA with his marketing automation experience to help organizations design, and execute, and measure their marketing strategies. When he is not designing programs, Ronn’s time is spent as an avid sports and fitness fanatic and can be spotted with his 11 year old son at Disneyland on any given weekend.

[00:01:26] Ronn Burner: Yeah, that’s a true story. Glad, and happy to be here.

[00:01:33] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, thanks Ronn. Ronn also, we’ve been working with us before and we’ve known all known each other for years. Getting into the topic now. I wanted to quickly share and set the stage. So the framework that I’ve thought about and come up with for this episode has come back to every business is trying to figure out, “What marketing idea should I implement next?”

[00:01:55] Kevin Dieny: “What should I do to maximize my investment in growing my business and generating leads, whatever the goal is?” So rather than come up with like a straight up list of let’s call it like a hundred different ideas that any business should be considering… I took a different approach to this and looked at this like; every business should look at its internal resources and their capabilities first to assess.

[00:02:26] Kevin Dieny: Okay, what do I have to work with, because I think that quickly narrows down for you, what let’s call them channels or campaigns or anything like that, that you would be capable of running. I think the best example is if you don’t have any phone numbers, you know, you’re not going to be calling anybody. So if we gave you a bunch of ideas, like, oh yeah, you should just pick up the phone and call. Call your perspective customers or prospects or whatever, then you would be like, “Wow, that idea is completely moot for me, don’t have that capability.” So, there were a few different dimensions on this and I wanted it to go over. One of them is if you don’t have contact information, you don’t have a CRM.

[00:03:09] Kevin Dieny: You don’t have some kind of a way of knowing who your previous clients were. If you don’t, maybe you do have that, but you don’t have it clearly in your database. You’re probably not going to be able to utilize those very much. Well, let’s say you do have 10,000 phone numbers of prospects in your database, but you don’t have any CSRs, any phone handlers, any SDRs like Matt manages, then you have the data.

[00:03:34] Kevin Dieny: You just don’t have anyone to use it. So then you have to think about, am I going to call these people? Do you really want to spend time calling them? Or do you want, you know, to have someone who’s going to be doing that dedicated full time? So I think you look at your business. I wrote down a couple things I think you could look at, and those are contact information, like emails, phone, numbers location.

[00:03:57] Kevin Dieny: Do you have addresses like direct mail or do you [00:04:00] have access to like an advertisement thing that’ll just hit an entire zip code? Do you have the time and effort? Yep. Budget. You have skilled labor; people who can call for you. Is there demand? You have a website? If you don’t have a website, you’re probably not gonna be doing anything digital fully.

[00:04:15] Kevin Dieny: We have an idea here. That’s like, “I’ll go, go look, work on your SEO or your social media,” and you don’t have a website or something like that. Probably need to do that first. So anyway, that’s the, the basis I wanted to set this up for is every idea is going to have something that you’re required to do.

[00:04:33] Kevin Dieny: If the idea requires you to do things that are just outside of your reach, probably not the best idea for you. So when we talk about a proven marketing idea think about what you have and what might suit you best. So I wanted to jump right into it. We’ll start with Ronn. Ronn, did you have any marketing ideas you thought of, or you wanted to bring to the table we could discuss?

[00:04:53] Ronn Burner: I think you sort of touched on it initially. You know, that the leads in the database and one thing that I find to be essential, I mean, yes, you need the website, but you want to segment in a way where you’re not speaking to the entire group as the same person. So if you can get some sort of level of segmentation or some sort of low level of differentiating them and with different personas, even if you keep it simple and have it smaller. And then you’re trying to touch on them in a way that speaks specifically to them. Even if it’s the same product you still want them to learn about it in a way that’s specific to them in a way that suits them in a way that fits them.

[00:05:34] Ronn Burner: It’s just really important to build that rapport with your audience. So they feel like that they can trust you and they feel like that they know you. So this, the key element that you really touched on was sustainable and scalable. So first thing I would do, yes, you’re right. Is the website is super, super important.

[00:05:52] Ronn Burner: Some sort of database management, some sort of controlling the data that you do have, but aside from those two things, I really… I think just mapping out what your plan is, what you intend to do in a way that’s sustainable and scalable. And then from there, once you have that basic little infrastructure, even if it’s small, once you have that in place, now that’s something that you can expand upon.

[00:06:14] Ronn Burner: And that’s really the way I would approach it from a small business standpoint.

[00:06:20] Kevin Dieny: Okay… so when it comes to segmenting, the most conventional way I can think of, that’s pretty easy to do is if you have a CRM or a database and separate, maybe the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff or the whatever you’re trying to do next from the people that you probably, it probably won’t be able to do next.

[00:06:39] Kevin Dieny: And that, that does kind of require some tagging, some information baked into that to pull that off. So I’d say if a business is like, “Oh, well, how do I get started with segmenting?” I’d be like, well, you need probably some form of CRM or database, and second you would need them, people, in there separated in some way.

[00:06:59] Kevin Dieny: And the most obvious way to me is customers from not customers, but it could also be: people in this area or that area, or people who have bought this from me or that from me, or I don’t know, something like that. Right. You’re pulling them apart that way.

[00:07:13] Ronn Burner: Yeah, I think engagement is that’s really the besides customer and non-customer. It’s engagement, I call it proof of life. Both you gentlemen, we worked together previously and proof of life was always something that I was into as it relates to data hygiene, the database hygiene, if you’ve reached out via telephone or email numerous times in a period of time and there was no indication whatsoever that there was even somebody on the other end of it. I would certainly put those in a bucket. It doesn’t mean ignore them. It just means treat them differently and approach them a little differently. That’s… that’s one way… Matt?

[00:07:53] Matt Widmyer: Yeah. We all lived in this world for a while. I think to the point where I started having dreams and sometimes even nightmares [00:08:00] about it of slice and dice everyone in your, a CRM, but some of the stuff we tried, I mean, we tried industry. And I think that makes the most sense if you work in multiple industries, like we do.

[00:08:11] Matt Widmyer: The day to day of a dentist versus somebody who pours concrete versus somebody who is the manager at a lollipop factory is going to be extremely different, you know, from person to person.

[00:08:21] Matt Widmyer: Also, what role do they have within the business? So the title is also really key. And then as Kevin alluded to the relationship they have, are they a customer, did they used to be a customer or are they a prospect? Are they somebody who we are just like trying to actively pursue and where are they in the process too?

[00:08:38] Matt Widmyer: So all that stuff, you’d have to kind of assess what you have to in terms of data points is, you know, do you have their phone numbers? I can’t tell you how many times sales managers came to me and said, “Hey, we should run an email campaign or a phone campaign.” And then there’s either no phone numbers, or no email addresses.

[00:08:56] Matt Widmyer: And it’s like, “Okay, we have to start after we spent all this [00:09:00] time building this big thing out.” And then we have to go back to square one. So that’s always step one is assessing the situation, seeing what you’re actually working with first.

[00:09:08] Kevin Dieny: Right. The next thing I wanted to dive into was a different approach on this.

[00:09:13] Kevin Dieny: So let’s say we divide the digital idea from a non-digital idea. So one of the non ones would be, let’s say like direct mail, right? If you do have. If we’re talking non-digital, it’s like a spreadsheet of addresses. If you just have a businesses, can you looking at your billing system?

[00:09:31] Kevin Dieny: Everyone who bought from me, I do have an address on maybe they’re not in a CRM. Maybe I’m more of like a brick and mortar type place. Okay, I’m going to send some direct mail to an entire zip code around my business, like a restaurant might, might think of doing something like that.

[00:09:45] Kevin Dieny: What do I need to send a bunch of mailers around my area? What’s involved in that because when you’re talking about a proven marketing idea, are you looking for an idea that’s proven to generate whatever the goal is, like a customers in your door or business to your site, or just greater awareness that you exist in the area you just opened up or something.

[00:10:04] Kevin Dieny: When it comes to proving it, you also have to set up with it, some form of how you’re going to track this thing. There are a lot of marketing ideas that don’t let that work. But let’s say they’re hard to track. There’s some that are maybe won’t work so well, but they’re easy to track. They run the gamut right of where they are in their abilities and where like capabilities of bringing in whatever your goal is. And then on the other side, how hard and how difficult is this to track? And if it’s like, “Okay, how many people walked in my door of my shop or business?” Or, “How many people came to us from this specific marketing idea?”

[00:10:41] Kevin Dieny: So Matt, what ideas do you have for, let’s say tracking some of these ideas that you think would help, prove that they had some lift?

[00:10:51] Matt Widmyer: Yeah. So obviously the easy one is to ask somebody how they heard about you, right? And, you know, cross your fingers and hope they tell the truth. You could also do call tracking. That’s what we do as a company. You know somebody is calling in, but you can do flyers, you can do coupons….

[00:11:07] Matt Widmyer: I mean, there’s definitely ways to track and then you also would need a landing place for that in the CRM as well. Right? So in the form of a, some kind of a unique field or unless you’re using like campaigns or, or something like that in your CRM this kind of way to tie it back together.

[00:11:24] Matt Widmyer: Did I answer your question there?

[00:11:27] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. Yeah. I know there’s lots of popular, like trackable phone numbers, QR codes a website link that has a like UTM parameter shortened so it’s not super long, you could ask someone, there’s geo fence. There’s some things that come to mind. Did we miss anything Ronn that you wanted to add to that?

[00:11:44] Ronn Burner: You touched on a lot of them the difficulty is not knowing what a company has at their disposal. Like what resources do they have, because certainly you can really get into the weeds with attribution and tracking and you can get down to where they’ve clicked. You know, even a couple of places after they’ve left you.

[00:12:01] Ronn Burner: I mean, you can really get into it. But from a variable… basic fundamental level I do think, like you mentioned, it’s priority to have a website and it’s a priority to have some form of database because without that, there’s no way to differentiate one person from the other and one might be super, highly engaged and buy all your content. Somebody might not even respond to you.

[00:12:20] Ronn Burner: So you absolutely need some form of sorting of that. Some sort of database I would say for attribution. And if you want to use a link, if it’s something linkable, even if it’s a mailer or I know Kevin and I, we’ve talked about Bitly there’s different ways to use a PURL.

[00:12:37] Ronn Burner: And like Matt said coupons and stuff. If you’re in the store sort of business that can offer some sort of promo code or some sort of identifier, the whole point is incentivize, if you want activity or engagement from somebody they most likely need to be incentivized in some way.

[00:12:55] Ronn Burner: And that doesn’t mean talking about all the features that your product has. It means talking about all the value that you can give them. And when there’s value offered that incentivizes some way, or somehow to get them to then do your ask, which is, you know, contact them, fill out the form and the fill out the form can have with a field specifically that they need to punch in a promo code, or you can even have a hidden field, like a lot of you know, automation, instances and stuff have hidden forms. So when that activity, the click, whether it’s a mailer or an email will then take them to the page, which has it is creating a query string there.

[00:13:30] Ronn Burner: They’re filling out the form and now it’s populated in hidden data for you. And they’ve just profiled themselves. You didn’t have to do anything. All they did was your action, which was your success. And they profiled themselves by telling you exactly what it is they want or are interested in. That’s kind of the perfect world.

[00:13:49] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, I was thinking about that because of projects we’ve worked on, one of the things that came to mind for me was urgency. So when it comes to a marketing idea, let’s call them longer term, like an investment in a website. It’s definitely not an investment in just a one-time one go thing, because so many campaigns can use the website.

[00:14:10] Kevin Dieny: It’s kind of like a predominant product marketing. Even if you don’t necessarily like your product, isn’t like sold on your website. It’s it is sort of your brand presence online. Not every company has people visit its website. There’s lots of businesses that we’ve worked with. And I’ve worked with over time that the website almost seems like a necessary evil, but here’s the thing….

[00:14:32] Kevin Dieny: The inner connectedness of everything, even online to offline does require more and more that businesses do a few things. And the starter kit for businesses nowadays seems like it includes a website. A connected way of putting your website on what’s called listing sites.

[00:14:48] Kevin Dieny: Google my business is probably the most predominant one, but the yellow pages used to be the tried and true right back in the day. Even businesses that probably weren’t getting a whole lot of leads from it. People could source it. And that’s how it got more awareness out there.

[00:15:02] Kevin Dieny: So. I think that if you’re looking at what are some of the basics I need for , urgency? If you want leads this month, then okay. A website kind of takes a little longer than a month to get going. So maybe there’s something else that you can do, but at what cycle and how frequent, how immediate is this need that a marketing idea has to solve for, right?

[00:15:23] Kevin Dieny: Cause like you can go Google some marketing ideas. And it’ll probably say, “Google my business, social media, get your website in order, send emails, call people….” But again, what resources do you have?

[00:15:35] Kevin Dieny: It’s hard to get those going quickly. For a small business, every single month that goes by without leads and you’ve spent money is terrible. So what’s a fast way that you can, let’s say … get some people through the door, get some business going. So how about you, Matt? Do you have any idea for something that’s a fast idea? Something that you could see the turnaround on within a months time of launching.

[00:15:59] Matt Widmyer: Is this a loaded question?

[00:16:01] Ronn Burner: I’m glad you’re going first!

[00:16:05] Matt Widmyer: No, I mean, that’s, that’s what, as an SDR manager, that’s what we live and die by on the telephone right now, at least for right now. That’s that’s our fallback, right? So the way I look at it, as if everything else went away the phone would still be there. And that’s what we kind of need to sustain.

[00:16:20] Matt Widmyer: Sure. You can go and test the waters with other things, but you want to be able to eventually assess how other things are doing, but you do those in tandem with the phone. The phone never goes away because you’re introducing those other things. So if you have an audience of people, the only thing you really need to be able to use on the phone is: who are you talking to you and B what are you going to say? So this is where you really need to get into, you know, knowing what your products actually do and why somebody is going to take the time to listen to you on the phone.

[00:16:50] Matt Widmyer: Because a lot of the prospects we call. We aren’t the only ones calling them. So you have a good 10 to 15 seconds the whole time, and they’re thinking, “Why am I going to continue this conversation?” If you don’t hit the mark, then it’s either a callback or it’s not going to happen.

[00:17:08] Kevin Dieny: Okay. Yeah. And also there are sites that have make available, phone numbers for purchase. It’s a little different than emailing; emails have a lot more scrutiny. There is a do not call, so don’t, don’t mess with that. You can get in trouble for that, but there are databases and things you can do. If you’re calling, if your customers are businesses, you could just look up, Google some businesses nearby and find their number, but it’s trying to reach those people it becomes a little, little tougher.

[00:17:34] Kevin Dieny: It’s going after customers, if you’re B to C, right? Is it worth my time to open up the white pages and call down on a list of people. But there are curated lists and things you can get, I would say phone numbers are probably on the safer side.

[00:17:44] Kevin Dieny: If you’re just calling them cold, I think that’s probably one of the fastest methods. Like within 10 minutes you could probably call someone, maybe make a sale or, or at least get someone through the door depending on what it is you’re talking about. But yeah, that’s a good one to jump into if you wanted.

[00:17:59] Ronn Burner: Phone is obviously the Quicken and easy. The problem with the phone as everybody knows is I don’t answer anything that I don’t know that’s coming in. And nowadays my phone tells me exactly who’s calling whether they want me to know or not. So it’s just hard to catch people when they’re like, “Oh, I can take this.”

[00:18:14] Ronn Burner: I would say to your point originally about urgency, first of all, I would devote all my time on getting a website because how do you expect, just ask yourself this, how do I expect people to find us? If you don’t have a website, you can’t be found. I mean, nobody’s scrolling through yellow pages or white pages like that.

[00:18:33] Ronn Burner: It’s difficult to envision any sort of traction outside of word of mouth or outside of a direct contact with somebody to ever be found. So that ROI on whatever time it takes to slow down your process to get the website up and running and then post things to a blog. Obviously the perfect world is blogs, just so you’ve become more and more and more searchable, to get into Google ads and all of those types of things.

[00:18:56] Ronn Burner: But aside from that the original point was urgency. And I would say if you’re lucky enough to have the situation where you can offer, if there’s a profit margin or some way to incentivize, and I always use the example of at a Lakers game.

[00:19:11] Ronn Burner: So taco bell will give every single American a free taco if the Lakers score 100 points, right? So a taco is 39 cents or whatever it is, but it’s brilliant. And the reason it’s brilliant is because they’re getting you in the door and you’re are now spending money. There’s no way, very, very few people are going there for that one, single free taco.

[00:19:30] Ronn Burner: They’re going there and since they got the free taco, they’re going to order more things. So same with the stolen base thing. So the idea of giving things away sounds on the surface. Like, no, no, no, no, we can’t do that. Well, the idea is you want traffic and you want customers, so it depends on what your product suite looks like, but that is also like some sort of promotion, some sort of campaign that you can run.

[00:19:53] Ronn Burner: If you have the ability to email, if you have the ability to do the mail or like we discussed earlier, some sort of promotional campaign to incentivize based on urgency and based on value. Which is, you know, black Friday lives on this sort of a thing. But you can’t go broke making a profit.

[00:20:11] Ronn Burner: So if you give something away for 10% off, you’re still got 90% that you didn’t have otherwise.

[00:20:18] Kevin Dieny: The offer, the magnet, the thing that whatever gets them there that’s huge too. If you think about that, because some offers don’t fit the medium very well. For instance, like calling people, just to see if they want 10% off something that they don’t even know, they want may not work out so well. But if someone’s already looking for something like on Google ads or the drive by a billboard and they’re already have something in mind and they see the 10% or 25% off or whatever. Then that kind of does get them past a hurdle. An offer of price is usually trying to combat a price rebuttal, where someone’s like, “This price is too much!” Your product may not be worth it in their eyes because they don’t quite see the value.

[00:20:58] Kevin Dieny: So it lowers that initial cost of them, maybe trying something totally new, like restaurants. It’s very risky to try a brand new restaurant versus going to one that, you know, has been open for a while and you’ve tried for a while and has a legacy. So reviews help a ton with that.

[00:21:13] Kevin Dieny: Right? Like they can kind of be that, “Okay, I’ll trust somebody else’s word of mouth.” If you want people in quicker, if you want some urgency and you’re capable of lowering your initial price requirement of coming in or giving some sort of an incentivized discount or like, “Hey, if you bring your friend with you, then you get 25%, like instead of 10%” or something, just to get more people through the door.

[00:21:37] Kevin Dieny: Those are a lot of good ideas. And what you actually craft your message to be of the marketing campaigns. So that’s really good stuff. Okay… the last thing is kind of more open for you guys. So is there anything else that you thought about, or that we haven’t talked about that you wanted to mention?

[00:21:51] Kevin Dieny: So I’ll start with Ronn on this one. Is there anything that you thought of before that hasn’t been brought up yet you wanted to jump into?

[00:21:59] Ronn Burner: Oh, marketing is such a vast pool. We barely just touched on the very, very basic things. Something that both of you have heard me say often in all the years and meetings we’ve been in together is “Keep it simple, stupid” and the only reason I say that is building some sort of infrastructure, some sort of foundation that you can build on because the foundation built correctly can always be… growth happens. Growth will happen as you evolve, as your resources come in, as traffic comes in, all of these things will naturally grow and it will grow at a way that’s sustainable simply because you put in place the proper foundation to support it.

[00:22:38] Ronn Burner: And as you grow. And as it grows you’re able to now dive into more of the software that’s required. More of the segmenting which is required which is, you know, segmenting is going to be very important to speak to them specifically. I guess the only thing I would add that we haven’t really touched on is I think of it as a relationship. So when you’re building a rapport with them. They’re not your customers, you’re not trying to do a bait and switch. You’re not trying to do anything other than build a relationship with them. Because back to the website thing, brand reputation is king like a good reputation.

[00:23:15] Ronn Burner: It goes or bad reputation is another way better way to look at it. Is, if you start to get a bad reputation it’s curtains. So building that relationship and the thing that a relationship building does is it keeps them loyal. And retention is a king, even though marketing, a lot of people don’t realize that, but keeping your customers is more important than getting a new one.

[00:23:37] Ronn Burner: Retention also does something else, and that is word of mouth. That’s free marketing, that’s free advertising. And when you can generate a buzz and when people are talking to their friend, like, “You know, what do you know, what I, what I did, this is great. You should check this out.” That sort of buzz only comes from your relationship that you’ve established with them and from your rapport and from being honest enough where they trust you.

[00:23:59] Ronn Burner: And when they trust you, that’s when they’re going to start recommending you. And that’s when they’re going to keep coming back.

[00:24:06] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, I think one of the subtle things you mentioned there I wanted to highlight was when you get to the point of, let’s say you’re a business running one campaign at a time. So I’m focusing on my website or I’m focusing on SEO or I’m focusing on ads or I’m sending mailers. You will see a tremendous lift when you overlap multiple channels and multiple things over time.

[00:24:30] Kevin Dieny: So it’s sort of like reinvesting in the campaigns, you may see this campaign worked better than that one so I want to do this one. You might not have the budget or the capabilities of doing multiple things at the same time, but if you do get to that point of having multiple channels, multiple campaigns overlapping over each other, helping each other it definitely gets it out there in a compounded, and amped way.

[00:24:55] Kevin Dieny: It just helps some channels help others. So a campaign on its own may not work as well as campaigns lifted by multiple others, but that does require again, looking at it from what it requires, it may require more resources and may require something else that you don’t have. So if you’re not there yet, You have to pick. “Which one do I think is going to work best?” And then, you go with that. And based on what you have, the ones that will be the cheapest for you, are based on the ones that you have most of the stuff, right.

[00:25:20] Kevin Dieny: It’s like, do I have all the ingredients to make this cake or do I have to go all the way to the store to get it? Anything you have that you can make work with? What you have will be cheaper.

[00:25:27] Ronn Burner: The other key point, there is all of those channels with the same messaging, which I totally agree with you, you hit the nail on the head there, all of those channels with that same messaging. A, it can be done with one. And then you tinker it for the other channels for social media or whatever, but what do they all do? They’re all driving them back to the website that you should have. That’s the key.

[00:25:51] Kevin Dieny: Matt, is there anything we didn’t dive into that you wanted to touch upon?

[00:25:56] Matt Widmyer: Yeah, I think the phones are our bread and butter. Right. But it, if it makes sense to do only, only be calling somebody, you know, it doesnt, right. It doesn’t, it could still probably get by barely on that, but we need the emails, we need the chats, we need everything else that comes along with it. Love how, Ronn mentioned also the value of taking care of somebody, giving them a good experience, right. They’re going to be back and not only are they going to be back, they’re going to be happy. They’re going to be talking about you, reviewing you.

[00:26:22] Matt Widmyer: And now they’re going to be telling all their friends about you too. So that’s I think where every business should strive to be. Because it doesn’t cost anything. Right. It’s just you doing what you’re supposed to, what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place.

[00:26:35] Matt Widmyer: Right? What you’ve promised your customers, if you’re going to do before they even did walk through your doors for the first time. I think that testing is critical. You have to figure out how long you’re going to run a test for. If you’re running something for three months and it’s expensive and you don’t even see a light at the end of the tunnel, Pull the plug cut your losses.

[00:26:53] Matt Widmyer: And, it’s not a loss because you’ve learned a lesson right now. Wasn’t the time to do that. Maybe you revisit some other time, but hopefully you have something else that you’re armed with now that you can take into next time you try that. If you ever bother trying it again. There’s a fine balance and this is where it’s really gonna depend on the capabilities and what the company is actually working with, the budget, all that stuff.

[00:27:19] Matt Widmyer: There’s a balance between how hard you’re physically working and what you’re actually doing and how much money you’re actually spending. There’s a little bit of a correlation there. Right? Cause the more you’re spending, the less you’re actually doing, if we had no budget at all, I mean, it only cost them a phone bill to pick up the phone and call somebody.

[00:27:37] Matt Widmyer: So that’s about it and the cost of a person, if you’re paying a person to do that, but still that’s I think that’s where, how we can skate by, on just that channel is because it’s usually a little bit more cost-effective. Now, if we had all the budget in the world… yeah, sure, let’s send everybody, a $1,000 gift card to take a demo.

[00:27:53] Matt Widmyer: I don’t think our price point justifies that, but it’d be a really easy way to serve the market. And then just look at spam if it was that much anyway, but you know, I think that if you find some kind of a ROI point – what are you hoping to achieve? So you should think about all this stuff before you go too far down the road, especially spending money or dedicating a lot of time, on something like this.

[00:28:15] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. Yeah. So, I’ll do a quick summary here. The things we talked about, the things that stood out to me… The first one was look at what resources and what things you have to begin with. What do you have to work with so you know, this is maybe the marketing ideas I could do. The ones you have the most stuff for the most resources, the most database, the most information for the most access to maybe, you know, a friend who can hook you up. Whatever things you have to go with it. Definitely look there first and it may not necessarily be the best ideas in there. So then it’s like, “Okay, well, where do I have to go outside?” Maybe have to spend some money, and maybe I have to hire somebody like Matt was saying. Because in the second part is like, how do I prove it? If there’s no way of tracking it, you’re kind of just hoping and throwing it out there, hoping that it works. The other people might’ve said, “Oh, this works.” And so you trust them, but having a trackable way to prove what you’ve done is humongous. And any time that you have any doubts about whether something’s working, you can go back and look at that.

[00:29:11] Kevin Dieny: That’s huge. That’s enormous for, for other people to be able to repeat , and for you to be able to hand that off. You can see inflection points or hinge points of what really makes that thing sing and makes that work. And then the last thing was touched upon with what Ronn and Matt were saying, which is when you get going with some of these ideas, “How do you know they work?” “How do you know you’re happy with what you’re getting? And having a baseline of, okay, my product sells for $200 or $50 a month, or I know the average meal that I serve is about $15-20 bucks. Or knowing your revenues and your costs, and then your breakevens of, I need to at least make this much sits with the other things, because you can afford to spend more or spend more resources in something that maybe has a higher return. You could also do more with something that costs less initially. And if you’re tracking it along the way, at any point, you can be like, okay, this isn’t working, I can cut it out.

[00:30:05] Kevin Dieny: You don’t just have to go the full time and then realize this is bad for me. So those stood out to me at least for finding a good marketing idea. And obviously we didn’t tell you exactly like what to do with a social post. We didn’t really go into the specifics of each marketing idea because I think what matters more is finding one that’s suitable for your business.

[00:30:24] Kevin Dieny: And. I think that comes out of, subjectively what is going on in your business and what can you do and what can you afford to do? And what are you looking at? Are you the business that has the thousand dollar gift card capability? Or are you just like, man, I just need, I don’t even have a website yet.

[00:30:40] Kevin Dieny: So it all fits into those things. We know it’s difficult and it’s hard. And every dollar you spend is a dollar you could put in your pocket. So it’s definitely gotta be worthwhile. So, any last minute thoughts you guys wanted to chime in on? And then we’ll kind of close out. So we’ll start with Matt.

[00:30:56] Matt Widmyer: I think just whatever you decide to do once you reach that point where you decide this is finally scalable… I can double down and pour more money into this and then just run with it. You have to always look at, like right now I have half a dozen people on my team.

[00:31:11] Matt Widmyer: If I had one person, what would I be doing? And if I had a hundred people, what would I be doing? How do I get a hundred people? Gosh, wouldn’t that be cool. But you have to look at like, okay, if it’s not working with one or five or 10, it’s not going to work with a hundred. So the little operational kinks and stuff like that you need to take care of before you get to that point, but I think scalability is huge. And that is the main benefit.

[00:31:33] Matt Widmyer: I’m such a CRM fanboy too, when it comes to getting the data in there and getting all the right data, getting the accurate data and keeping up to date. That’s really, the only way you’re going to scale a business is by having a solid CRM infrastructure.

[00:31:47] Matt Widmyer: And then obviously, like Ronn said, website’s great. Website’s great for us too, because anytime somebody doesn’t know what the heck we’re talking about on the phone, you can just have them visit our website and kind of explore at their own leisure. Right. So all those things are super important. Super scalable.

[00:32:03] Ronn Burner: Yeah, I’ll piggyback off of that because I’ve said it several times, even on this call scalability and sustainability is something that I say in the consulting and implementing marketing departments for organizations, because often times there’s grandiose ideas and you can get there, but you need to get there and you need to get there in a way that’s efficient in a way that makes sense.

[00:32:26] Ronn Burner: So not only is scalable applied to the database and things of that nature, which is massive. I agree a hundred percent. And I believe it applies also to process like you need to have a processes in place of what you’re going to do. And that’s why I always go back to having a game plan, map out what you want to do, what your plan is, think ahead 90 days.

[00:32:46] Ronn Burner: Then start building in pieces, so its scalable, and then you’re going to go over these 90 days and always be 90 days ahead. The reason I say 90 days is because, to launch a campaign and then even to use the additional channels with the same messaging to drive them back to your website, like we already discussed, but the reason I say at 90 days is then what, like then what? And it goes back to reporting and it goes back to attribution. The 90 day plan says, okay, I do want to do this, go to market strategy or whatever this plan is, whatever this promotion is, right.

[00:33:16] Ronn Burner: But after that, this is where I want to go. And then after that, this is where I want to go. So now you’re doing some sort of a cadence and some sort of a frequency, and you’re being consistent with your messaging to them. So just think in terms of game plan and even little wins at first, and then, like I say, you add on that.

[00:33:35] Ronn Burner: But game plan and process, because the better your efficiency becomes the better the performance will be on the other end, because it’s going to now open up the opportunities to put work elsewhere into the strategy into other areas. Because you’re not so tied up trying to do double the work because your processes just aren’t efficient.

[00:33:55] Matt Widmyer: Yeah. How did you refer to that in the past Ronn, digging a pool, with a shovel?

[00:34:03] Ronn Burner: Right? Yeah, you can dig a pool with a shovel or you can dig it with a high performance machine and the end result can absolutely be the same, but how you get there, is it two very different worlds?

[00:34:20] Matt Widmyer: Yeah.

[00:34:20] Kevin Dieny: I think anyone listening to this might have like alright, maybe I’m walking away from this with not the best idea that’s going to work for my specific business per se, but a toolkit of how to get there. And that’s really exciting. I think if you can go to your office, your home, wherever you’re working right now and be like, “Okay, I’m just going to write some notes down, I’m going to take a look and see, I’m going to look into my database, I’m going to take a pretty good look around at my business and see what I really have; when I can work with might be different than my neighbor’s business. Or if I look over at the store next to me, or my competitors might have different resources than they do. So I may not make sense to just copy every single thing that they do.”

[00:34:58] Kevin Dieny: At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to what you can pull off, what you can prove, what’s going to raise money. What is going to meet the goals that you have and you can start small. So I want to thank all the listeners who’ve tuned in to this episode.

[00:35:12] Kevin Dieny: And when it comes to connecting with us I wanted to ask you guys, what’s the best way for someone to reach out to you and connect with you. Matt, what’s a good way for someone to let’s say, find you, connect with you, or ask you any kind of questions from this that they’d have?

[00:35:24] Matt Widmyer: Yeah, sure.

[00:35:24] Matt Widmyer: You can find me on LinkedIn. Matt Widmyer it’s M A T T  W I D M Y E R. Or you can email me at my CallSource email: Mwidmyer@callsource.com.

[00:35:39] Kevin Dieny: Cool. How about you Ronn?

[00:35:40] Ronn Burner: Yeah. You got to keep it simple so they don’t have to jump all over. I’m also on LinkedIn and Ronn Burner, R O N N very tricky B U R N E R. And I sometimes check my LinkedIn…. <laughs>

[00:35:53] Kevin Dieny: <Laughs>, So you can find us, I’m on LinkedIn as well. There’s also the show page, show notes, everything will be there. So thanks everybody for tuning in, really appreciate it. Hope you are excited to jump into some new marketing idea or maybe even to turn off a marketing idea that you probably realize is not working out so well, maybe you should go do something else. So it’s all progress. So thank you everybody. Have a good day.

[00:36:18] Matt Widmyer: Thanks everyone.