I discovered recently that Pinterest is like the third most important search engine after YouTube. People think of it as a social media platform, but it's really a search engine. Just like YouTube is a search engine that features video, Pinterest is a search engine that features images. Mmm, that's good. Good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. And I'm your host Brett Dyster. And please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review. Really just help with it.
But this week we're going to talk about digital marketing. It is a marketing podcast, so why wouldn't we talk be talking about that? But with me is James and he's done digital marketing for quite a while. He's built his business since 2010 and James is passionate about websites and helping the rest of us understand online marketing and customers value his jargon free, common sense approach. But welcome to the show, James. Hey man. I'm really happy to be here. It's an absolute pleasure.
Yes. And the first question asks all my guests is are you a coffee or tea drinker? Coffee. Anything specific? Anything like dark, medium, light, roast or you just give me a cup of coffee. I don't really care what it is. Just give me a cup of coffee and I'm good to go. All right. And I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give us a little bit more about what you do? Well, we're very involved in website design and development. That's our core business. We have two basic propositions.
We do large custom websites for corporations. These are custom from the ground up and usually have custom code in the back end. They're connected to other things, APIs, all that good stuff. Which is a roundabout way of saying we actually know what we're doing. But this has allowed us to be vertically integrated. We don't use other people's hosting platforms. We've built our own hosting stack and I have developers and content specialists and we've repackaged that platform as innately.
And this is more of a semi custom solution for six figure businesses who are just getting into digital marketing and are ready to move away from the DIY thing and take advantage of my team and their expertise which has been honed by supporting the large corporate websites to actually do their day to day maintenance work on the website and help them with their digital marketing and that sort of thing. So what have you seen from your experience of businesses missing the mark in digital marketing?
I think the most common problem that I see is an absence of strategy. There's an awful Lot of what I call inside out marketing. And that's where the marketer is shouting at the world about how awesome they are. When you know, sad, but the world really doesn't care. What they're really truly looking for is they have a problem and they need a solution to their problem, which is outside in.
And if you have a strategy, if you've started with understanding who your customers are and you've mapped the buyer's journey, you understand the steps they go through, the kinds of questions they have, the obstacles they're trying to overcome. That's a strategic foundation that will allow your marketing, your digital marketing especially to resonate with and engage with your target audience and support the journey that they are on.
And the net result of that approach is the sale stops being a sale and starts being the next logical step in their journey, which leads to loyalty, which leads to long time customers, which leads to all kinds of mutual value in the relationship. And that is with that simple application of a strategic foundation, you can achieve those sorts of things. Gotcha. So let's say the marketer is shouting to the world how, look how awesome they are. And they're getting frustrated because no one cares.
How do they start that journey to figure out how to do that strategy? The first step is to have a customer avatar for each of their key segments. Most businesses, if they look at themselves honestly, 80% of their sales are coming from 20% of their customers. And if they look closely at that 20%, there's usually two, sometimes three sub segments inside that group.
Do an avatar for each one of those sub segments and then do some investigation into what causes them to start noticing, because I sometimes call it the box and the dot. The marketer sits inside of a box and they're surrounded by all of the things that are important to them. But that box is barely a dot on the horizon to the average consumer. You need to be there with the right message.
When something happens in the consumer's life that stimulates them to start thinking about this category that you're in, that's your top of the funnel stuff. You want to draw them in and attract them into the funnel with something that engages with where they're at that point in their journey. And then in the mid funnel, you're looking to create opportunities for microtransactions of increasing value. This draws them in, it builds trust, it builds relationship.
They start to look to you as a trusted source of information. And then at the bottom of the funnel is where the decision is being made. And that's A different set of questions, a lot more around comparisons and reviews and reasons to believe, social proof, that kind of thing. So each one of these tactics has a different role at different points in the buyer's journey. And if you don't have that journey map very hard, you're just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks. That's not smart.
Could, let's say AI help you with that? Because marketers are busy people, we're scattered brains a lot of time. Could AI help you with starting to figure out that journey? Because I think for a lot of people it's not that they don't or marketers, they don't want to do that journey. Sometimes they just don't know where to start. Yeah, there are some AI tools that around Persona they call Personas is what they'll call it in the AI world. And they can get you started.
You still have to apply your knowledge of your market and your experience. And the better the information is that you can give to the AI, the better that Persona that you're going to get that comes back out. The AI tools will make take a stab at a journey map. It tends to be pretty rudimentary. It, it's not much more than you could probably do yourself with a little bit of common sense and time. But even an awful lot of this, Brett, is you remember the bear and the two guys in the woods?
Yes. I don't need to run faster than the bear, I just need to run faster than you. And if a marketer just steps back and puts some energy and effort into this, they're already likely going to be ahead of the game in terms of their competition. And should there be like a list of different problems? Because you could figure out one problem. You're like, maybe that's not really a problem for the actual customer. Should you have a list of them just to see if one messaging hits more than others?
Because like I said, it's all a testing process. You're trying to figure out what combination works. Right. And that's where another key piece of this whole thing that often gets overlooked and that's measurement. I had a call earlier today with one of my clients, which is a mid sized bank in the Midwest. And I'm, I asked the marketing director, are you using UTM tracking codes to track your activity? No, they're not.
So how can you tell whether Instagram is working for you or Facebook or Pinterest or LinkedIn? How can you tell what's working and what's not working if you don't have Those tracking metrics we've been playing with really getting some great traction out of a bit of a surprising platform. Pinterest. I discovered recently that Pinterest is like the third most important search engine after YouTube. People think of it as a social media platform, but it's really a search engine.
Just like YouTube is a search engine that features video, Pinterest is a search engine that features images. And we've started treating Pinterest like a search engine and our results have gone huge improvements. Is this just like general searches? Is it like picture searches? Because Pinterest started as more of a picture, Is it video? Is it like an all encompassing one? Because I think TikTok is pretty popular for searching as well. Yes, it is.
Yes. But it's with Pinterest it's using the same keyword strategy that you're going to use on YouTube. It's a similar approach. It's about creating your boards in Pinterest and not just calling it my left ankle, actually labeling the boards with keywords that you want to rank for. We have a board for digital marketing, we have a board for relationship marketing, we have a board for all the various things that we're interested in website design and development.
So these are all the titles for the boards and the description of the boards are all being crafted against an S. Against a keyword strategy. Is it also creating those sub boards within the boards? Because yes, I've used Pinterest, I really understand it. But is it doing all that stuff to make it look more full? Because when Pinterest was new it was all about just boards. But now they've gotten a little bit more technical where there's no sub boards.
They don't do repins anymore, they just do shares. I don't know. Yeah, focused on saves and engagements and. But Pinterest is great. If you're trying to drive traffic to a website which is good for your domain authority, then Pinterest is one of the only platforms, third party platforms that rewards you for clicks. The other platforms will penalize you for putting a link into a description or a caption. Interest rewards you for clicks.
I think LinkedIn is probably the only other ones that doesn't really negatively impact you because they do have request to service in like your bio now. So I think there's only like a few of them because yeah, X Twitter doesn't want you to leave. Instagram doesn't really want you to leave. Meta. I should just say Meta just doesn't want you to leave at all. Exactly. So having A strategy.
Understanding where your audience is, understanding what your audience is looking for at each stage of their journey. Creating content that's going to resonate with them at the stage that they're in. That's how you're going to attract folks and draw them in to your environment, your world, your website, in a way that is creates value. Your goal should be to create. The website should create value for the customers and for the business. And does content play a part with that as well?
Because we've done the technical side, but there's also the creative side that you also have to worry about. Because for example, you said Pinterest, there's boards, there's pictures and I think they do vertical videos. I don't know if they. They don't do horizontal, but they're vertical. Vertical videos. Yes. Same format as Instagram. And it's. And videos is up and coming. Just like YouTube is pushing hard on their shorts. That this is an up and coming.
It's still a minority of the activity, but it's definitely up and coming. It's something that needs to be part of the strategy. Yeah, create content is. I've been working on a series of blog posts right now about content marketing and bringing that strategy under foundation into your content marketing. The recent updates in the Google search algorithms are all focused around creating useful content. And you know that what's useful.
What's useful is if you understand who your audience is and where they're, what they're looking for based on their journey, you can create content that's useful. One of the things that I see a lot of people miss the mark on is they spend all kinds of time and energy on keyword research. Awesome. But they don't give proper consideration to search intent. And search intent is really key in terms of understanding the content that you're creating and where that content should live in your website.
And LinkedIn is also experimenting with the vertical videos now because they've been the square videos for so long that should companies figure out which platforms to use Because Pinterest, when people think about Pinterest, they usually think it's more for where women usually do their boards and stuff. They don't really think about search, but they also don't think about probably B2B companies really focusing on Pinterest. They probably would focus on LinkedIn.
Is it like a pick and choose thing between B2B and B2C for social medias? It's a good question. But if you've got a clear understanding of your audience, then you're going to use different channels in different ways. We're using Pinterest for coaches and health and wellness folks and that sort of thing. We're very carefully targeting our content to appeal to the audience that we know exists on Pinterest that could take advantage of our products and services.
Inside of LinkedIn we're much more focused on the corporate where we more often than not function as a subcontractor to a design agency that has a relationship with a corporation. They're doing the design in the UX and they're using us as their construction general contractor. So we'll use LinkedIn to facilitate that kind of targeting. And the higher six figure type businesses that can take advantage of innately will use LinkedIn for that kind of messaging.
I use the LinkedIn newsletter for example, as a very useful channel. Carousels on LinkedIn, if they're done properly, can be very useful. It really helps. I also do a lot of public speaking and LinkedIn is very good for supporting my authority when I'm speaking to events or conferences or podcasters about coming on their show. So different channels should be used and it really depends on who the audience is.
And talk about more about emerging tech because as a marketer you always gotta be worried about the emerging stuff. We have AI, we slowly have web3, which to me web3 is basically AI and blockchain. So how do they future proof it? Because I know right now marketers, it's basically it's nice to use AI, but you don't really have to. Should marketers start to really lean in, not to have AI do their job for them, but to have AI help them with it.
It's all about AI as a helper, we're using AI every single day. I'll give you an example. Our content specialists do a really good job of helping our smaller businesses design and build websites, but they are not designers. They're well trained, they can do a better job than the average person, but they're not designers. One of the key things that separates a professional design from an amateur design is the use of color.
So I spent a month or so working on a prompt that would help us set a color palette for a website using the 60, 30, 10 color strategy. That's a color strategy that web developers have taken from the design industry, the interior design industry, to help set the balance between background colors, secondary and primary colors, and the accent color. It I worked on the prompt, it generated a palette.
I'd send the palette off to some design friends that I know they'd Give me feedback, I'd work on it some more. It took about a month. It works like gangbusters. Is it as good as what a designer can do? No, it's not, but it's much better than the content specialist could do on their own. And it's been so successful, actually I got one of my developers to package it up and we submitted it to the WordPress repository and it's now a plugin that's available in the WordPress repository.
So AI as a tool to solve very specific things, very effective. So for a one man team marketer, they could have AI help them with various different tasks. Obviously they would still oversee it, but at least you could do various different tasks and it makes you look like you have a team when you really don't have a team. I'll give you another example. One of my friends owns a digital agency.
He has more than doubled his business and actually reduced his headcount by integrating AI tasks and AI task management into his systems and processes. Because eight times out of 10, when somebody calls your support line, they're asking the same question. It's a wonderful place where AI can be very useful. Keyword research is another place where AI can be very useful. There's a plugin, a tool that we use a lot called Keywords Everywhere that has an excellent extension to ChatGPT.
So it's a great, it's a great tool and you're, it's not going away. So if you're frightened of it, yeah, you're going to get left behind. You got to figure out how to make it work for you. And so would you recommend them actually use Chat gbt? Because there are several of them. There's Gemini, which used to be Bard. There's Gronk, if you have X slash, Twitter, Premium meta, just I can't release their own. You also have Nvidia that you can download as an offline version of it with their Chat rtx.
And then you have Perplexity, which is pretty good with research. And you have Claude, which I think is like the middle ground of everything because there's just a lot of them. There are a lot of them. And it's, you know, it comes into the. Your earlier question about different social media channels. One of the things I tell clients all the time is don't try to boil the ocean. Find a couple of things that are working really well for you and figure out how to make them work better.
And that's what we're open to. And look at lots of different platforms, but Generally speaking, we're using a combination of ChatGPT and Claude. I find that ChatGPT is really good for basic stuff, for research, for structure, for outlines, that kind of thing. And Claude is much better at write a long form copy. Filling out the blanks, filling out. Give me three paragraphs on. Here's the headline. And I pulled the headline from this outline that was provided by ChatGPT.
And then when it's all done, edit ruthlessly. Inject your own experiences, inject your own language use. Train the AI. One of the things that I'll do is before I'll start, I'll pull copy blocks from three or four different blog posts and I'll ask the AI to analyze this copy block for tone and style and then analyze this copy block for tone and style. Analyze this copy.
But I'll do it three times, four times, and then I'll say, summarize what you've just learned and then I'll say, you are an expert copywriter. I'm where we want to do a blog post on this topic area using the same tone and style that you've just analyzed. Prepare an outline of H1, H2, H3 tags that you know, that we can use to create this blog post. And it does a really good job. It writes like I write when I show it. How got you. And we're, I would say almost midway through 2024.
What should markers be focusing on from the rest rest of the year? Because every year has its new challenges and everything, but what should they really be focusing on? Since we're at this inflection point, obviously. With AI and everything else, but AI is just a tool that what marketers should be focusing on hasn't changed and it hasn't changed in years. Focus on creating value for your best customers and use the tools to deliver on that objective.
All right, and so people are listening to this podcast. They're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about what you do and maybe get some more advice? I would suggest if they're, if they'd like to chat with me, they can go to VIPchatwithjames.com that's VIPchatwithjames.com if they're interested in having me have a look at their website, one of the things that I will do is what we call the 6 second website audit.
And where that's coming from is you have six seconds or less to engage a visitor to your website. Most of the most websites are not up to the task. So to do that, you'd go to sixsecondsorless.com and you can grab a free 30 minute session on my calendar and we'll go through your homepage and I'll show you the sorts of things that you might want to consider to create a page on your website that is actually going to support the journey that your clients are on. Any final thoughts for listeners?
Stop trying to boil the ocean. There's just so much going on. There are so many choices. There are so many things you can do. The Years ago there was an interview with Peter lynch was his name. He was the general manager of the Magellan Fund, a big mutual fund. And the reporter was asking him to what he owed his success and he was expecting a really deep and involved answer. But the answer he got was water the flowers and prune the weeds. And digital marketing is a lot like that.
But it because it gives you visibility on your metrics. It lets you know what's working and what's not working. Figure out what's working. Do more of that. Figure out what's not working. Stop doing that. All right, thank you James for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on digital marketing. Brett, it's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for listening.
As always, please subscribe to Digital Coffee Marketing Brew on all your favorite podcasting apps with a five star review. Really just help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing and join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR marketing industry. All right guys, stay safe. Get to understand your customer journey, learning how to use AI better and not boil the ocean because it's never a good thing to do. And see you next week. Later.