Marketing strategies can dictate either a triumphant success of a business or a tragic waste of resources. The worst part is that most businesses with poor marketing decisions don’t realize they are doing something wrong until it’s too late! That’s why in this episode, Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver talk to Brittany Murphy, a Partner at One Thing Marketing. She explains how to revamp your website and reinvent your marketing by discussing the psychology behind it. Brittany also breaks down creative ways to promote your business to successfully convert your target market into loyal customers. Tune in and learn how to level up your current marketing tactics to yield the most desirable business results!
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Why Your Current Marketing Sucks With Brittany Murphy
You may know that I have struggled with so-called marketing experts for pretty much my entire professional career. A couple of things that I struggle with is that they are good at selling and sharing information, which shows they are doing a great job. Many marketing companies don’t focus on the things that matter.
In this episode’s guest, when I first met her, I knew that there was something different because they do focus on the things that matter, the things that are going to drive better results for your marketing efforts and drive more revenue to your company so that you can improve your bottom line. We are going to have a great conversation about a couple of things that you can do to improve your marketing and get phenomenal results. I want to welcome to our show, Brittany Murphy. She is a partner over at One Thing Marketing, and they are doing things quite differently from the rest of the market.
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Brittany, welcome to the show. I’m excited to have you here.
Thank you for having me, Ryan. I am excited to finally get on this show with you after talking with Tammy.
We have been in conversation for quite a while now, and there are some great partnership opportunities here. More importantly, I want to introduce you to our readers because I know that you have a unique approach to helping people with not only their website but their marketing in general. Tell me, in your opinion, what is the biggest myth? What is that thing now that many people reading believe isn’t true, and you want to shatter it for them?
From big to small, most marketing doesn’t work and is a waste of time. Niching that down further, what I specialize in is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. The biggest myth is SEO is a scam. I’m ready to debunk all those.
We talk a lot about writing effective job ads, and I have to remind people that Indeed is a search engine. You have to search engine optimize your job ads because if you don’t, it doesn’t know what you are talking about. I do get what you are saying and why that myth exists because a lot of people out there are less than honest when it comes to SEO, but I don’t believe you are in that bucket. Tell me this idea that marketing doesn’t work and that SEO is a scam. Where does that stuff come from? Why do you think that people believe that?
In my role within the company, I get to hear the Festivus of anyone in the trades looking to complain about what is going wrong with their business. I love it because I know the root cause of most issues. What I’m hearing from most people is that they feel like they have been swindled. They had been taken advantage of. They were paying thousands of dollars monthly and, at the end of the day, had nothing to collect for it. That is where most of this is coming from.
By the time someone is talking with me about a new strategy, they are jaded. It is my job to audit and give them explanations and examples of a good strategy to move forward with. With more education, you can make better decisions. That is where we were talking briefly before we started. For most marketing agencies, their job is to sell. They are going to spin what is going to work the best and, at times, mainly what is the best for them and what is not always the best for the clients. I like to jam-pack knowledge into this. That way, you can be a smart, savvy business owner because you don’t have 40 hours a day to think about marketing. This is where you can focus all over your business but know you have the best cards in your back pocket.
The job of most marketing agencies is to sell. They will often spin things that work best for them and not for their clients. Click To TweetThere is an element of education. Where a lot of marketing companies fail is that they don’t educate well. They send reports that nobody but them understands. They send all this information as super technical and full of jargon, and at some point, you have to trust. It was like, “I spend X amount of dollars. How many new clients do I get from those dollars?” There are many moving pieces in between. That is usually where the communication and the information break down. I love that you are educating people.
When it comes to overcoming this myth and hurdle, I’m sure there are people reading now who were like, “I know some of those marketing people that you are talking about.” Maybe they are working with one and they are afraid to pull out. What do you think’s holding them back? What do you think is keeping these business owners from thinking this way and continuing to do this? What are some actions they can do to break through and get through that?
When we look at the root cause, it is going to come down to time or money. These are usually the two issues we are juggling when we are not letting everything make sure that it is going as well as it can. Our time is being spent somewhere else. For example, someone who is lacking in money is going to be more of a newer business and maybe not have too many employees. They are trying to drive leads. They are going to take some more of their time to DIY or do research to talk to find someone local that they trust to work with. On the flip side, most companies I talk to have no time in the world. They are busy from sun up to sun down.
That is what I specialize in. My guys are busy, but they need to stay busy. If you can’t devote your own time to make sure you are staying busy, you are going to have to hire and spend money for someone else to keep you busy. Make sure you are still showing up when you need to make sure you are doing business throughout all the seasons, and you can keep all your guys fed, full and hungry the entire year long. What I see the most issues with is either we didn’t devote enough time to figure out what we needed to do, or we blew money and had no accountability. Our marketing company may be doing reporting, but it was based on impressions. Do you know what impressions 100% means, Ryan?
I don’t know, but last time I checked, that is a vanity metric.
What we get down to is when I look at different reports other companies come to me with, and they say, “This is my marketers doing. What do you think? Is this working?” I ask them those questions. At the end of the day, is an impression a phone call a new business? No, I don’t know what an impression is. Let’s take a step back, ask and figure out what the heck is going on so we can make better decisions about where we are spending our money. Marketing can feel like a scam because we have all heard the phrase, “You have to spend more to make more.” It is not always the truth with marketing. I love to even squash that thought.
For those of you that are wondering, a vanity metric is one of those that doesn’t mean anything. It is fun to talk to your friends about it, or the marketing companies think that they are cool because they are usually big numbers. Vanity metrics don’t drive the results that we are after. Impression is one of those.
If you think even several years back, before digital marketing was popular, vanity metric was all we had to track traditional marketing. How many people drove past a billboard? How many listeners tune into this radio station? They were what was all that was used. We will get into it down the road in this interview so stay tuned. I’m going to tell you how to push back on these numbers because what worked then is not going to work now for you.
I love what you said about where we see a lot of our clients. They don’t have the time. This is what I believe about marketing. Feel free to disagree with me. When we are marketing for open jobs and recruiting, if you don’t spend the time working with the experts, getting them the information that they need, and helping them understand the intricacies of your business and the way you recruit, you are throwing mud up against a wall until the marketing company figures it out. As much as you might not have the time, you have to make the time if you want this marketing stuff to work well.
To be truthful, we don’t want to figure it out for you. We could be wrong. That is not something we want to spend your money on and be that close to wrong with it. One of the first questions we ask our clients before we write anything on their website is, what is your voice? Are you always conversational? Are you serious? Are you always making jokes left and right? Are you a punny type of company? Those are things we want to know because, with recruiting and trying to find a new client, they are going to be geared and pulled toward certain dynamics and personalities.
The more lovable and likable you are, it works not only for my role marketing to close more business and get more leads. It is also going to help when you are getting more leads and have more employees trying to get in with your company to work with you because they like what your message is and what they see with those things. It is a beautiful relationship they can have if you can make them work together. I like to tell people, “It is two birds in one stone.” What Ryan is saying versus what I’m saying, you can use these things in harmony together on your website and marketing.
The more lovable and likable you are, the closer you get to more businesses, which leads to more leads. Click To TweetA lot of people tell us, “The only way to recruit right now is to offer and give more money.” That is akin to being the low price. I know this for a fact, and everybody knows this, people don’t leave their jobs. They leave managers and people. We have all heard that saying. People don’t look for a new service provider because they want to save money. Brittany and I, as marketers, recruiters, and people that are going to help you grow your business, if we don’t understand who you are at your core, it is hard for us to help you. What is one thing they can do to start getting some results and seeing some movement forward?
The first answer is common sense, unfortunately.
We all know common sense isn’t all that common sometimes.
It is always worth repeating. The biggest thing I tell all my guys is you have got to take your marketing back into your own hands. What I mean by this is even if you are in a large company and you have an internal team doing this, if you have not talked to that marketing team internally for weeks or months, who is? Who is helping them try to gear them toward the right position?
Let’s take a step back. Most companies I work with do not have an internal marketer. That is why they are working with us, an outside agency. I have to pull teeth at times, Ryan, to get people to meet with us, to tell us some things and questions that we need the answers to continue doing the best service for them and marketing them in the areas or with the services that they want. You have got to talk and have this communication.
When we talk about recruiting, there are answers that people want to see on their website. When it comes to marketing and new clients wanting to call you, whether their roof, toilet, or HVAC system is leaking, they need to be able to see these answers to build trust and authority with you. The more information you can jam-pack onto your website, social, or anywhere you are marketing yourself fully and completely to, the more likely you are to go to get that sale, get that hiree, or everything you are looking for. At the end of the day, we’re all asking questions. We are mainly asking those questions to Google first.
Does your website, which Google is using to find the answers, have those answers on your website? One of the biggest things is a small and big company all comes down to the same thing. You have to be providing value and resources to your clients to get more people to find you and to build your business in a scalable and non-expensive way. If we choose not to do that, which myth busted that search engine optimization, Google rankings are all about having the content and ranking when people type that question in, how much HVAC repair near me? How much does HVAC replacement cost? Metal roofing versus shingle roofing. They are all questions they are going to.
If you don’t have those answers, Google is not going to find your site. It is not going to be put in front of someone, and they are not going to end up using you. I always tell my guys, “Have your texts written down these questions? Have your office staff write down these questions?” If you are getting them often, tally mark them. These are questions I bet you $10 you don’t have on your website, and you don’t mention it anywhere. They are having to do research, and you are making it harder for them at the end of the day.
We teach a process when it comes to recruiting to have an FAQ page on recruiting. Not only what are the most frequently asked questions, but what questions do you wish people would ask? We teach this process to create a page as FAQ. I imagine they could do the same thing to help Google out, not have to worry about how they squeeze it into a paragraph or on their homepage to have FAQs. It is a page where Google could know these are some questions they can get answered.
You have that FAQ page, and later on, you are eventually going to have a blog post on your website that lays out these questions in full because those are the pages that will rank. That is the page that you want to rank because when it pops up, you have a little call to action that says, “Book, schedule or send here your resume.”
Whatever it is on the aspect of you are making it seamless and simple for them to get in touch with you. At the end of the day, I told you in five minutes, that is the marketing funnel. Getting found, giving them something to make them trust you, and they trust you enough to close to be your new client or be your new employee because they found you via that metric. If you are not doing any of it, you are going to always struggle because you are never going to get found by people you know, new clients and employees. We are all online now, and that’s my joke. Every kid born out of the womb with at least an iPhone 14 is the one that the newest babies are coming with.
The marketing funnel is about being found by people and giving them something to make them trust you. Click To TweetGoogle doesn’t care how pretty your website is. Google doesn’t care about those things, but if the things that Google cares about aren’t helping you get found, the rest of the stuff doesn’t matter. The number one reason that people struggle to recruit good employees is that good employees don’t know they exist, especially smaller businesses.
If you throw an ad up on Indeed that says nothing about who you are or what you do and they have never heard of your company before, they move on. In recruiting, 75% of hiring managers say, “It is easier to recruit good people when people are familiar with your company brand.” I imagine it is at least as high, if not higher, when it comes to getting customers. Being found and people being familiar with your brand is critical. You can do it through SEO, Google and those kinds of things. You don’t have to buy billboards, television commercials and all the other stuff, which I don’t recommend because they are hard to track.
Number two, please track everything. Another myth I’m going to bust is that you can’t track everything. It is going to be busted. You can track everything now. It is not going to be perfect for every situation, but that is half of why I’m disgusted by a lot of marketing companies nowadays. They are not doing the due diligence and the proper type of tracking to help the business owners at the end of it.
They are tracking impressions. That is great. Impressions in my world when it comes to Google rankings means that is how many times your website popped up on the first page. If you can see impressions rising, that is a great thing. That starts to tell you, “I’m starting to rank better.” That doesn’t mean your calls have tripled yet. That doesn’t mean you got anywhere further that you need to be in the goal.
What I talk to a lot of people about is call tracking, social media tracking and traditional tracking. Those are the biggest things that you have to put what you are doing on, and it can work in all facets of the business, like I alluded before. In the old days, we couldn’t track as easily. The only way we could was to buy separate phone numbers and have a million phone numbers. At the end of the day, it ports into one because we had to have a separate one for our newspaper, billboard, TV ad, radio ad, magazine ads and so forth with it.
It is a similar system now as to what we use, but that is my biggest problem. I want to shout from the rooftops. If you are working with a marketing agency or you are not working with anybody, track your crack. You need to track your website and Google my Business. You need to track if you are running Google ads on your social media if you are running ads there.
I will be honest. I’m not a huge advocate of in the trade space because if my roof is leaking, I’m not going to TikTok or Facebook. I’m going straight to Google, typing in roof repair and some keywords such as that, and getting the first few people that show up that have good reviews. I’m going to call them and schedule out some quotes.
That was the key. People that show up. That has been a big challenge right now. I need someone to do some fence work at my house, so I contacted 7 or 8 people. I had two that called me back, and I’m like, “I can’t help you.” That is on the customer side, but that is on the recruiting side too. This is my little pet peeve right now. We talk a lot about ghosting. Everybody knows that employees are ghosting like crazy. Two-thirds of employees never hear back from you. They never hear back from companies when they apply. Do you want them to stop ghosting you? Stop ghosting them. That is a soapbox for me.
I hear you there because we are marketing. I get a lot of people to reach out to us, and we are not a national firm. I’m hiring everybody left and right. We have seasoned tenured employees. I have a little template in my email to send saying, “Thank you so much. Right now, we are not hiring.” I give them some resources because I want to leave a good impression. Should we need someone else? I don’t have bad taste in their mouth. Maybe they went to a company, stole some great trade secrets and several years later, it is even better timing for us. You never know. That is on the sales side.
Not that we create all of the sales processes for our clients. We are creating the marketing process. It is more on your shoulders to create the internal sales process. How are you reaching back out to your customer? How often are you following up with them afterward? As a homeowner for several years, I have replaced almost every single thing in my home, but I have seen many different follow-through processes.
Not that it is 1% of your forefront marketing. That is the end marketing. If you did all this work to have a good website, have all this content on there, make sure you rank and they are calling you. You are ending the follow-through process or the sales process preemptively. You are leaving a lot of dollars on the table, which, unfortunately, is going to offset what you think is working for marketing.
That is why we talk about tracking and relating that back to this tip two because if you can track, you will know exactly where each of your leads is coming from. Are they coming from all the time I’m spending on social media? I’m looking at my TikTok because I’m a local plumber. I see they are all coming from this coupon code I had, my website or these ads I’m running. You can relay it back there and know where you need to spend your time. That is where you can track everything. If anyone wants to know how to, I’m more than happy to yell at you and tell you how you can do it.
I have a background in digital marketing. Even with my business, I struggle with getting all the tracking. Things are changing. There are new tools, techniques, and all sorts of new things that are happening. I will tell you that spending the time putting together this tracking strategy or this plan with the experts, like One Thing Marketing, is going to save you so much headache, pain, and money to do it right up front.
What is that saying they have? If you fail to plan, plan to fail. That is what you are talking about. It is never too late to put this tracking stuff in place. That is my personal opinion. If you don’t do it now, it is going to cost you so much more money figuring it out and going to the school of hard knocks and hoping that you got a great marketing team that can do it. This is one thing I believe. You got to track through the whole thing. If you close a deal and you are not reporting that back to your marketing company, I might be stealing some thunder from you, Brittany, but that is a problem. You need to tell them, “I closed these. I didn’t close these.”
One of the things we see a lot when we are developing metrics for employees is we will often see people hiring CSRs, which are essentially the marketers and sometimes they’ll be a sales team, especially for larger estimates. The texts that are selling are always like, “They keep giving me bad leads.” I go talk to the people that are closing the business, and they were like, “I didn’t know they were bad. Nobody told me.” Part of tracking is you have to communicate. Sorry, I’m getting all a little soapbox and stealing some thunder from you, but this is why you need to hire an expert for this stuff. Especially when it comes to performance management with your people, they can’t perform if you are not giving them good stuff.
I will shout this with the mountaintops with you because one thing I give all my clients the power to do if they want it is a log-in to see their call tracking system. I can tell them where calls came from, but I don’t know at the end of the day which clients sold. Did you get a $50,000 lead that you closed? It is the holy grail of all clients you want. Please, either give me that phone number or take that phone number and try to find it in the system.
Control F, we can all do that, put that number in and see where they called from. That information is going to help not just you but it helps us to know. We are getting 90% of your best-quality callers from this. Do we want to cut spending the extra $5,000 a month on that billboard because we only got two phone calls from it, and neither of them closed?
Think of the money you are trying to save with us. Call tracking does require spending some money, but there are many clients we have saved $1,000, $2,000 to $3,000 a month with continuing because we were able to track it. They found who closed from where and they are able to justify at the end. Should they continue any of these marketing channels because we do need to spread ourselves out a little bit? We should not spread ourselves so thin and keep money in places that don’t work. That is where we are both trying to think and make sure everyone understands it.
In the digital marketing space, when it comes to customers, the mediums and vehicles you have to use there way ahead of the recruiting space. In the recruiting space, we don’t have the tracking, so we do have to put some crazy stuff together. A lot of people come to us, and they will say, “Indeed is the only place I get employees.” When they go back and track it back, they were like, “We get lots of applications, but we don’t get any employees, especially ones that we like.”
When we shatter that for people, they go, “Maybe Indeed isn’t where I should be investing my money. I should be doing it somewhere else.” That is what you are talking about. We had a client that was running radio ads for recruiting for $40,000 a year. When we started tracking it, they got zero new hires from that. It looked and felt good. It was in the community. If they went to a coffee shop, the barista would be like, “I heard you are out on the radio this morning.” It is all vanity. It didn’t drive them results.
Make sure that information is back on your site. They might find you on Indeed, but if they are going to do a Google search on you, they want to find the dirt. Your website could be the best place to stomp on some of that dirt, like we talked about in those FAQs. We have some FAQs, and I will make it brief. It is almost telling you what we want you to be if you are going to work with us. It was like, “Here is what a good client is to us. Here is who we work with.” It is stuff that might seem blunt and not that, “We don’t want you if you are this way.”
One of the things we say is if you are not going to track, we are never going to have a good relationship because that is what we need to make this a partnership. If you are against that, feel free to do a Google search again for these keywords and see who pops up and find someone better there. It is all those things that we are making them give that information to eventually, once you call, submit that contact form.
Even to that, as far as when it comes to recruiting side, is the follow through. Everything you have back on your website or other marketing has to relive those advertisements that you are doing and give even more information because we can’t slap everything that is amazing about your company on a billboard. It is never going to fit.
I’m going to ask if this is a trade secret, tell me, but I know there are DIYers reading this right now going, “You are talking about call tracking and great call tracking systems.” Which one do you recommend? What is the best one out there?
We use CallRail. That is my favorite but some people don’t like it. I had a meeting with someone who wasn’t a fan of it, but when we talked about it, it came down to his marketing agency not using it correctly for him. One thing I tell everybody is if you use CallRail, you can set up what is called a whisper message. That way, it will whisper to you. That is what our clients get calls from website. It will say that, and within one beep, you will be connected with the person who called. If you want to track these things internally, you can. It could have call tracking numbers for your job boards. You are trying to recruit versus a potential client you are trying to close. You can know the difference between them and give them an even better first impression of them.
I don’t know how to do this, maybe you do, but we had a couple of clients that have given up their traditional phone system and went to CallRail because it tracks and records everything. They move all their numbers over there, and the whole phone system lives in CallRail, and it is cool. If we could keep going, you even brought up a reputation for a second. That is a whole other episode.
There is so much here that we could talk about. I love that you broke it down into those two things, being educated, understanding, having that relationship with the marketing team, being a part of this and tracking. The tracking is the one I geek out on because I wish we had the tracking in the recruiting space that you have in the digital marketing space. It is not quite there, and frankly, I don’t think it is ever going to get there, although we’re all doing our best to make it happen. I know that you got an offer for our readers. I learned some great things now. I’m sure they learned some great things now. Tell us how we can learn more about you but also take advantage of this offer.
I want to make 2023 better than 2022 for every trade business I talk to. If what I have said helps scrape the surface of what you are interested in and if you have an in-house team that needs to refresh, revamp and have that good beginning-of-the-year marketing talk with each other, we have a free eBook. It is the 9 Trade Service Marketing Strategies Proven to Increase Leads.
If you are in some type of trade or home service industry, go to our website, OneThingMarketing.net, and it is at the top say, “Download our eBook,” It will come straight to your email address with everything you need to know. It is a nice hefty PDF. You are going to give examples and some good strategies within it.
My second offer is if you say, “I don’t have time to read or do anything. I need to be told what to do.” We do offer a free strategy session. On that same website page, you can click the top right button, and you will schedule a free strategy session with me. When I told Ryan, the fun part about it is I got to do homework. You are going to schedule 30 minutes to brainstorm, but I will be doing a pre-audit of your website, SEO, and marketing.
If you are running any ads, I will look into all those things, and we will meet for 30 minutes. We will give you everything you need to either do this on your own moving forward or have us create a strategy. We can do this for you because we are a niche based in the trades and home service marketing agency. That is what we love and specialize in. That is what my dad did my entire life growing up. I understand what it means in a family business to make sure it is thriving, growing and making sure that there is food on the table for everybody now and in the future.
Thank you. You can take advantage of not only that eBook but the strategy session sounds awesome because sometimes we are close. Things are right there. We are off by a degree or two, and you need a second set of eyes to say, “Did you know this? What did you think about this?” You can solve it.
I know Brittany, and they are amazing over there at One Thing Marketing. They aren’t here to sell you. They are here to help. If you end up doing business with them, and that is how they end up helping, that is awesome. If they can get you unstuck or point you in the right direction, like you said, you never know what is going to happen in the next few years. You never know where someone is going to be at. Take advantage of that. Brittany, thank you so much for being here. I enjoyed it. I have learned some things myself.
Thank you, Ryan. This is awesome.
Important Links
- One Thing Marketing
- Indeed
- CallRail
- 9 Trade Service Marketing Strategies Proven to Increase Leads
- Free Strategy Session
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