New Podcast Click & Convert – Podcast | Josh Ramsey

SEAN CLARK

Like to thank our show sponsor Optio. Optio is a Google Ads management tool and much more. If you run one Google Ads account or 100, Optio will save you time and enhance your ad management skills. Smart, powerful and built to make life easier. 

SEAN CLARK

It will automate routine Google Ads tasks and alert you automatically to trends and even make automatic recommendations. You can then spend more time on high level strategy and creative work. We use Optio in our agency to make us more efficient and effective. 

SEAN CLARK

Go to optio .com forward slash click and convert to claim your six week free trial. That’s optio .com forward slash click and convert to claim your six week free trial. 

Josh Ramsey

This is the Click and Convert podcast, bringing you the latest marketing techniques used on the world’s leading online platforms, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Here’s your host from online marketing agency Clarkson James, it’s Sean Clarke.

SEAN CLARK

And welcome to the Plickens and Villains Podcast. I’m Sean, Oh Sean, and back again. So we’re coming up to the silly season now. We’re in October and we’ll be encroaching on Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

SEAN CLARK

All of that silly stuff is coming up very soon. So today’s guest is probably quite relevant to that area. Although I must say, if you haven’t got your stuff in place by now for Christmas, you are well behind.

SEAN CLARK

You should have been planning this back in the summer, but you know what it’s like. We all get busy doing other things. Anyway, today’s guest is Josh Ramsey, a fractional CMO and digital marketing executive who works with companies to help them map out a more robust marketing strategy.

SEAN CLARK

Josh is a Google partner and owner of a digital marketing agency, brings nearly 30 years of sales and marketing experience through his role as a fractional CMO for companies, looking to dominate their competition across every advertising medium.

SEAN CLARK

When he’s not directly coaching his clients or hosting his own radio show, Josh travels the country teaching his marketing strategies and methods that have been proven year after year. He’s also got a background in coding, done some master mining, has marketing and sales programs.

SEAN CLARK

In the last 10 years, Josh, you’ve been a busy guy, built a CRM system, an operations management program, website audit programs, and the world’s largest, I hope you can clarify how you measured this, library of SEO descriptions.

SEAN CLARK

And you’ve got a book coming out which we will also talk about shortly. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Josh Ramsey

Hey, thanks for having me. How’s it going today? 

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, it’s great. Thank you very much. You’ve been busy going the last 30 years. 

Josh Ramsey

There’s a it’s been a wild ride, but it’s been it’s been fun. I’ve enjoyed it

SEAN CLARK

So 30 years in this business you must have seen a lot of changes.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, I think only about once a year do I see something that’s a little bit wonky and it’s always fun to figure it out, but yeah, I’ve dealt with just about every industry. I think the most interesting industry is I wrote an entire marketing campaign for a company that sells pads for psychiatric hospitals, so the wall pads.

SEAN CLARK

Oh, those pads, not writing pads.

Josh Ramsey

No, no, the actual wall of pads so that people heard themselves. That was a fun campaign, maybe the most interesting one.

SEAN CLARK

Right, yeah, okay, moving on. So the term fractional CMO, what does that actually mean?

Josh Ramsey

So companies have a hard time growing and they oftentimes hit a plateau of growth and what happens is they work with an agency or they hire the average marketing person to come into their company to help them get to the next level but at some point they hit a wall with that person or that agency where it’s not robust enough.

Josh Ramsey

They don’t have a bigger picture. So they need a high level marketing mind that will take them to that next level. So what I do is I like working with companies that are in that that spot and they’re trying to figure out how can we jump but they can’t quite afford the highest level chief marketing officer.

Josh Ramsey

So they’re looking for someone to come in oversee what they’re doing maybe revamp their system or hire better marketing people or train their staff and kind of get a fresh perspective on what’s going on so that they can better adjust their systems and grow their company and move beyond that plateau that they’ve been stuck at.

SEAN CLARK

So you’re basically helping them make the right decisions when it comes especially to online marketing.

Josh Ramsey

It’s it’s not always it’s not just about the right decisions. But yes, that’s one way to look at it, right? So it’s it’s about If you go off of making the best decisions, absolutely, but it’s not just focusing on one Element of lead generation.

Josh Ramsey

It’s the full picture But your online presence has got to be there because no matter where you advertise they’re going to look online They’re going to look at your reputation. They’re going to look at your website.

Josh Ramsey

So that is a fundamental staple that has to be paid attention to

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, and as we know, this this sector, especially the online digital sector, has so many different, should we say, skill sets now. You know, there was a time when you you could be a web designer and that would mean that you did coding, that you did UX, all sorts of things got involved in analytics, whereas now it’s it’s actually a lot more broken up.

SEAN CLARK

So it makes it much more difficult to, you know, just to build a website in the first place. So how do you how would you go about building an effective website? Where where do you actually start with something like that?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, that’s a phenomenal question and I think a lot of people get lost when it comes to building a website and they don’t even realize it. So what I always tell people when I teach conferences is I tell them, close your eyes for a minute and I want you to identify and picture a type of person and that person is going to be a designer.

Josh Ramsey

What do they look like? How do they dress? What environment do they thrive in? And then once you have that picture, let’s look at a second person. And we call that person a coder, someone that puts together the technology of the website.

Josh Ramsey

And what does that coder look like? What do they thrive in? What environment do they love to thrive and work in and how does their brain work? How do they dress? And then when you open your eyes and you compare these two individuals, often times you’re going to see that they’re two very different people.

Josh Ramsey

The designers are kind of bright bubbly type people and the best coders are people that want to work at nighttime. They want to work in a dark room and just put their head down. They don’t want to talk to people.

Josh Ramsey

They just want to work on a computer. And where I think that even if you identify these two, probably the largest area that people miss is someone that is in between these two people. And that person is what I call the strategist.

Josh Ramsey

The strategist is the one that helps you write content, that understands your goals, that understands how the user experience of design with your goals and call to actions get placed by a coder properly and then making adjustments along the way.

Josh Ramsey

That strategist ends up being the most critical piece of building your marketing, specifically website marketing. And therefore when people don’t understand what a strategist should be and what they should do, they essentially have a hard time growing their online brand.

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, I mean I get that. I mean companies especially get so caught up in the tactical elements of a website, the functionality, when actually if you tailor it for your audience the actual functionality becomes quite secondary because you’ve already got the buy -in there already.

SEAN CLARK

So what are your thoughts about using sort of straightforward simple programs off the shelf, the likes of GoDaddy’s platform builder or one -on -one, I think it’s got a different name now, I honest. They’ve got self -built website platforms within them, everything from basic couple of pages now up to full e -commerce offerings.

SEAN CLARK

What’s your thoughts on things like that?

Josh Ramsey

I think for startup companies it works well when you’re just getting started and we don’t have a large budget to work with. Working with those simplified programs can do you some good but essentially they become a business card online.

Josh Ramsey

People need to know who you are to be able to Google your name and hopefully you’re found although sometimes that doesn’t happen and that leads to a problem when you’re trying to rank for specific keywords for words that are more commonly searched and that the programs like a GoDaddy or one -in -one type program they just limit you primarily I would say there are a lot of markups like schema type markups we’ve identified about 15 to 20 different types of markups and every day these markups continue to increase.

Josh Ramsey

So when you look at doing search markups versus local organic markups for schema to help Google’s code identify what you’re trying to rank for a one -in -one or a GoDaddy build simplified markups and they’re not very in -depth that’s just how they’re built so when you get away from that GoDaddy it actually does a lot more for you and I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that working with a platform such as a commonly used program called WordPress you can do a lot of the same thing that you’re doing with GoDaddy but it can be a little more effective in the long run especially as you look to optimize as your company grows there’s a lot more options that you have when you work with a different program like a WordPress type platform. 

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, I mean, just to explain, for those who are not familiar, but markup is just little bits of code that you can wrap around, say, an address to tell Google that this is a street, this is a city, this is a province, this is a post code, or whatever it happens to be, like a telephone number, and it helps Google actually integrate those into their search, especially at a local level better.

SEAN CLARK

One of the interesting things you said there about WordPress. One -on -one, they’ve actually released a system now where you can actually launch a whole WordPress site from within their backend, which is quite cute.

SEAN CLARK

So you can take that next level step without having to go through the whole install thing, which is quite cool. But as you say, the SEO limitations can be quite large on the off -the -shelf type platforms.

SEAN CLARK

So talking about channels, I mean, you’ve touched on a number of times about SEO, and you’ve said about, you know, you’ve got a large library of SEO descriptions, etc. I mean, where do you put SEO in terms of priority for most clients?

Josh Ramsey

Typically, it’s going to be second or third. The first one is going to be goals. What are you really trying to achieve? And then the second one would be more of the process that you have once someone enters your system, once they identify themselves as a prospect, whether it’s qualified or unqualified, but they’ve entered your educational spectrum, then you need to identify those two items almost at the same time. 

Josh Ramsey

And then you’ll start looking at SEO. You look at lead generation versus your general strategy.

SEAN CLARK

So where do you put SEO against sort of paid advertising and email marketing, where do they all layer together?

Josh Ramsey

So, again, it becomes goals, but essentially, they can run together. They run at the same time. I think many times I find ad agencies that they’re running paid ads and they’re running organic work, organic being SEO.

Josh Ramsey

But what happens where agencies fall off is that they don’t have those two departments working together. See, when you run paid ads, there’s search terms that you can identify that people are typing in to find your ads.

Josh Ramsey

And whether you show up or not, you can still get that information from paid ads. But the paid department, the department of an agency that runs paid ads, they oftentimes don’t share those search terms with the organic side, the SEO side.

Josh Ramsey

And if they did, then the SEO side should be writing a lot of content around those terms because a lot of times they become what’s called long tail keywords. And as long tail keywords, those are the easiest ones to rank for, thus commonly overlooked.

Josh Ramsey

But those are words that you want to pay attention to because you can draw a small amount of traffic. But if you rank for them and you’re driving that traffic and you find, say, eight or ten of those keywords, all of a sudden you have eight or ten long tail keywords and you’re equaling the amount of traffic that one bucket keyword would be generating for you.

SEAN CLARK

And how would you set expectation, especially for the smaller businesses out there in terms of SEO? I mean, it’s, you know, in some competitive areas, you know, it can take an awful long time to make a mark.

SEAN CLARK

And I don’t know, where do you sort of say, well, don’t expect to see any results for two to three months, six to 12 months, do you see any of that or do you think you should start to see the tell -tale signs early on?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, within 30 days, you should really start to see them title me. And some of that’s kind of twofold. One of it is you need to know what they’re doing day to day and how they’re doing it. You know, I when I interview people to do any type of work, I ask them what their day to day is and I ask them to give it to me in specific detail.

Josh Ramsey

Don’t tell me, oh, I worked on this code and I optimized this and I worked on this site to get them ranked. No, tell me how you did that. Like, what type of work did you do? Did you write meta keywords?

Josh Ramsey

Did you implement it? Did you look at the tag cloud? So some people say, well, meta keywords are nonexistent. It’s actually not true because meta keywords are written into your meta description and title.

Josh Ramsey

And they also are on page words, thus leading to a tag cloud. So then people say, well, tag cloud was taken off search console. Not really, because the tag cloud carries weight, which is also known as density.

Josh Ramsey

So now let me circle back to your question. You can identify those long tail search terms through keyword research by understanding those long tail keywords. They are easily rank, rankable. That is a word. 

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. So as we look to rank there, we can start to see traction. I use a program that allows me to see in a bar graph the keywords that a company is ranking for and allows to show me from position number one to position 100.

Josh Ramsey

And within that, I can see either a green arrow or a red arrow. And if we watch this movement within 30 days, some of your lower ranked words can start to move up within 30 days if you apply the correct SEO based on the website, your marketplace and other various factors.

Josh Ramsey

But a good company, a solid company that’s doing SEO should be able to give you some results in 30 days. May not be what you expect, but thus set your expectations properly. Set those goals before you hire somebody and then track those goals in specifics.

Josh Ramsey

I mean, do you have sort of guidelines for how much content should be being written on a daily, weekly, monthly, monthly basis? I mean, I know there’s a lot that can be done on the technical side of SEO, but once once that’s done, you know, is there a specific amount of content that people should be knocking out, if you like?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, I mean again great question. I think you start with the core and your core has to be built well, right? I don’t work out as much as I should but when you talk about working out you always start with your core.

Josh Ramsey

You go to a trainer and they say let’s work on your core of your back and your abs and you know what really holds your framework and you would be blown away. I was shocked a couple years ago when I read this figure.

Josh Ramsey

According to some very high level researchers 89% of websites have at minimum one page that’s what’s called low text to HTML ratio. So low text to HTML ratio means you have a certain amount of code on a website and you don’t write enough content for that page.

Josh Ramsey

So when you have low text to HTML ratio it doesn’t matter if your website is say 500 pages. If five of them or ten of them or twenty of them have low text to HTML ratio you’re essentially shooting yourself in the foot.

Josh Ramsey

So continuing to write content for that website thus becomes to a degree obsolete. So you have to start with the core of what are your core pages, what pages do you already have and do you have enough content on those.

Josh Ramsey

Then next step is the content directed. Well then yes the answer to your question is you know depending on your industry and the content that you can write I would say if you’re publishing at minimum one new page a month then you’re doing all right.

Josh Ramsey

I mean obviously you can do more but I think you set your goals that you can achieve to begin with and then you work from there and grow from there.

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, yeah, no, I totally get that. So, you know, if we’ve built up or building up this content, you know, one of the other things that gets talked about a lot is link building, link acquisition, outreach, those type of things.

SEAN CLARK

You know, where do you see that sitting, you know, once you’ve built your content in terms of building the authority for a site over time?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, link building is important, however, it’s extremely hard to do it right. The most credible links that you can drive to your site are ones that are from sites that carry a heavy amount of authority.

Josh Ramsey

So when you think authority, the first thing is we don’t have enough time to walk through what the authority is, but you can, you know, your listeners can Google that and identify what authority website looks like and what it is.

Josh Ramsey

But essentially you want to start with websites linking to you that carry heavy authority. Some of the sites that carry the most authority are going to be .edu’s, because the .edu’s are going to be universities, schools, another one is going to be .gov.

Josh Ramsey

Because .gov’s, again, carry heavy authority and if they’re linking to you, there’s a reason for it. So let’s say that you’re a medical company and you get a .gov, then there’s probably an article on that .gov that you have earned enough credibility that they’re linking to you.

Josh Ramsey

If you’re just trying to link or what’s called a link wheel, if you’re, say, an ad agency and you’re just doing a link wheel where all of your clients are now pointing their website to you, that oftentimes can become a spammy type of SEO and link building.

Josh Ramsey

So link building, you have to be very, very careful with, but mainly earn right content to earn credibility and that credibility, when you submit that through, you can do programs like PR Newswire. When you build that credibility and you have a well -written website, then you submit that to different organizations and try to earn those links and when you earn those organic links to your site, that’s when linking really becomes effective, thus showing authority to your website, thus improving your rankings.

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, so when we get down this deep, so we’ve already spoke about the technical side, the design side, linking, writing content, I mean, to me, that’s four people before I’ve even got started. So that immediately screams small business needs agency.

SEAN CLARK

How does a small business qualify an agency that can actually provide? I mean, more importantly, providing the right service at the right cost, I think, because there are many agencies out there that do an absolutely brilliant job, and they really, really do.

SEAN CLARK

They win awards every month. They highlight with all the top brands, but the small business just can’t afford that bill, and they can’t afford to hire a person in -house. So where do they get the balance?

SEAN CLARK

Not to waste their money.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah again such an awesome question and sometimes hard to answer because I go back and I use the word a lot goals and it really does come first of all to your goals what are you trying to achieve and are they achievable because different goals you know for a billionaire is going to be one versus a small business owner that’s typically not a billionaire and they have a different budget they don’t have a you know Amazon or Starbucks or McDonald’s type budget so you have to look for agencies that and feel free to kind of guide me down a different path if I’m not answering your question but you really want to start with with agencies and understand what makes them relevant because at the end of the day agencies have a specialty they have a certain amount of people in a process of how they handle SEO and you know I always tell people you ask five different agencies strategy on how to better your website and you’re gonna get five different answers yeah and sometimes it’s not necessarily that they’re lying to you or they’re deceitful I think there’s definitely probably two or three in that group of five that are they are not doing very good and they’re a little bit shady but at the end of the day when you when you do find the legitimate companies the agencies that are working for you it becomes experience strategy and opinion on why they would recommend and identify for your website for your company the best tactical moves to increase your at the end of the day business owners we care about one thing making more money yes so to a degree we don’t care as business owners how we get there we rely on quote unquote marketing individuals to help us get there to generate the lead so that our sales people can close more leads so when you’re trying to find an agency you’re really looking for them to generate leads not necessarily close the sale so that has to be your first goal but then understanding their strategy is is the next part and then going back to budget it’s such a tricky question the end of the day if you want to spend two to five hundred dollars typically what you’re gonna find is it’s a one -man outfit it’s one or two people that are working together that started an agency together and that’s where you can afford it when I started my ad agency ten years ago I had a two hundred and five hundred program and I charged more than that on some clients I had some clients that were paying twenty five hundred a month when I started out and those were my big clients now they’re considered average clients for me as far as the scale goes of revenue to my company so that kind of gives you an idea of what some companies pay but if you are gonna pay two or three hundred you can get something good out of them but you again need to set the goals realistic goals and know what they’re doing and how they’re going to do it and thus you can get good information I have a program that I created for small businesses that charges three hundred and fifty dollars a month but they don’t have a project manager they don’t get to call in and have a lot of conversations but it helps them grow and it gives them a good baseline program that they can work off of and it it gives them something of value so that they can grow I like to help small business owners as much as I can simply because I was one at one point in time so I like to help people that are trying to help themselves that are really working hard but frustrated with the marketing world thus I I do a radio show and do a podcast like yours and I publish a lot of marketing material just to try to help those business owners that are really struggling did I answer your question yeah.

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, you did. I mean, you know, one of the things that has always frustrated me about this industry is that it’s lack of qualifications. I mean, if it was the financial services sector, you know, it’s almost like it was back in the 80s for financial services when there was very little restriction on what could be sold and can be sold.

SEAN CLARK

And I feel we’re still like that, especially with the online marketing side. The development side, I think, is growing up quite quickly. But the online marketing side, it’s so easy to read a book and then think, you know, how to do SEO or Google ads or Facebook ads.

SEAN CLARK

You know, and some people get lucky and they really are good at it. But there’s a lot that aren’t. And that really frustrates me. How do you, I mean, you need to get in and out of those situations quite quickly.

SEAN CLARK

How do you identify that as a small business that actually you’re not talking to the right person or agency because the small business owner, to be quite frank, isn’t going to have that knowledge to make that decision a lot of the time.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah so so I’m gonna go ahead and throw out just so so people have an option is I talked to a lot of business owners on a monthly basis and I give them free advice you know I help them as much as I can I can’t obviously spend hours upon hours without a coaching program to help them through that I do have a baseline coaching program like you kind of alluded to that I work monthly with business owners to help them identify are they working with the agency is the agency doing their job but for free a lot of times I just talk to business owners to try to mentor them enough to get them on the right path so you know it’s it really comes down to experience if people know a marketing person in their life getting opinions can help but you need to be clear on perspective of what that opinion is I’ll give you a perfect example last week I had a client call me and they got a evaluation from another agency saying that some of the people that work for me weren’t doing their job so I sat down and I identified what the other agency said and I identified what my my team had been doing for them for the last eight months and what I came back with was the entire foundation of the website that was just built and launched less than eight months ago the site was actually launched three months ago all of the groundwork was there and the other agency never identified that all of this work had been done only identified what hadn’t been done and I looked at it and I looked at the business owner I said of course they’re pointing to what hasn’t been done look at our plan for the next three to six months and 90 of what they’re saying we should be doing is on our next three to six month plan so I said you know let’s not lose our minds thinking that things aren’t done if you really want to know go back to that agency take this list which I gave them and said here’s what we’ve done take this list and go back to them and ask them are these things completed and they’re going to tell you yes unless they’re lying because I can show you specifically every element that I’m sharing with you have completed tasks um so that’s where you can kind of identify and be careful when you’re talking to people because again you don’t you don’t want to get one more quick story I’ll tell you I had a client come to me they worked with another agency for several years they worked with me for one year I looked at their analytics analytics are basically it’s a free tool from google and it tells business owners what it is uh visitors information so people that come to your site how they get to your site when I looked at the general audience we were down 90% in traffic year over year so when I looked at that I kind of panicked a little bit I said didn’t we really screw up over the last 12 months but then I started diving in and what I found was the fake traffic the referral traffic that was coming to his site in the previous year was being generated from spam bots so these are programs that you can pay a few bucks a month to and they will drive traffic to your site so it looks like you’re increasing on traffic but when you look at the referral you can see that it’s uh it’s coming from other sources like xyz .com and thus you’re really not driving organics and that’s really what you need to pay attention to is your acquisition of organics to see what happens so again those are two quick case studies of of items and elements that that I track um to to help you know identify where companies are going and why. 

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, there’s a good point on the analytics. Google Analytics is such a huge beast. It’s easy to get caught up in there, but if some of the settings haven’t been, you know, the spam one you’re alluding to can be as simple as their tick box.

SEAN CLARK

They’ve got a little tick box in admin for that. But also, you might need to spend ages excluding sites, especially some of those spam SEO ones that generate loads of referral links. So yeah, one, yeah, go on.

SEAN CLARK

Can I jump on that? Yeah, go on.

Josh Ramsey

Just went to what most consider is the largest SEO conference in in the world and at this conference three different Google executives spoke and most interestingly they Recommended to not worry about those spam links that are coming to your site I said you don’t want to build them and if they’re hurting you if they’re toxic You definitely want to disavow them which you can do in search console However, they made a very big point to not worry as much as in the past.

Josh Ramsey

We were worried about it So you definitely don’t want to have toxic links Tell you stories about Agencies that have built toxic links. I have a very funny one but I don’t want to necessarily cross that bridge where an agency had posted them to a Very different type of website that was it in their industry to build links So you want to be careful of where your brand is mentioned and where it is found?

Josh Ramsey

But I wouldn’t worry too much about those toxic links. I would just say be careful of of The authority score like we talked about before what is the authority of the site that you’re trying to get linking to you So I didn’t want to step on you there, but I wanted to This is kind of a new deal it’s it’s a little more cutting -edge to understand those important things because And you kind of alluded to this SEO is a fast -paced Changing world and while someone could be good at it right now. 

Josh Ramsey

I tell business numbers roofers contractors Whoever whatever industry you’re in you didn’t start your company thinking hey, man, I’m great at marketing. I’m great at SEO Let me start putting roofs on houses Like that’s not why you started your company you started your company because you thought hey, I am good at this I’m gonna start a company and then marketing kind of kind of has to happen so that you continue to grow that business So that’s where you kind of want to be careful of like what are the new strategies and even though you feel like you’re good at SEO Are you keeping up with the trends and the current information and that’s also where you can see results quickly?

Josh Ramsey

Where people are one agency would focus on let’s go disavow all these links while another agency May be more successful by focusing on your content first, but that’s going to go to information strategy and experience along with knowledge of the most current trends and what’s cutting -edge right now.

SEAN CLARK

Yes. I mean, when businesses have got a finite budget, allocating that budget can be a bit of a challenge on the marketing side as well. As you said earlier, really all the business owner is interested in is generating leads.

SEAN CLARK

If you’re an e -commerce site, you’re interested in sales, but at the end of the day, all the marketing company is going to provide is leads to the website. You’re the one that’s got to convert them on the e -commerce site.

SEAN CLARK

So, so you’re generating leads. So, how do you balance out that finite budget over say paid ads, email and SEO? Because I mean, again, SEO is just another one that’s really hard to, or can be hard to quantify, return on investment.

SEAN CLARK

Whereas ads is, could we say a lot simpler? Click on an ad. Did it generate a lead? No. Zero return on investment. Yes. 100% return on investment. Whereas SEO could be a little bit more spooky around the edges.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah so again I love the conversation and this right there everything you just said is exactly why I have opened up a new business a little bit outside of the agency that I have built over 10 years and that’s why I moved to the fractional chief marketing officer because of what you just said which is how do you track it how do you know from an unbiased point of view what you’re really getting because if you go to an agency and you say hey how am I doing they’re gonna tell you whatever numbers that they have but they’re not looking at the big picture of the company of where are you allocating budget what’s your best ROI and I’m gonna come back to that in a minute of a strategy but let me answer real quick the e -commerce because you said that several times in analytics you can set up what’s called funnel visualization and I did this for a company this was about six years ago and we were running funnel visualization we came back within three months and we identified that we had a huge drop off on a specific page we couldn’t quite figure out why so we quickly went to that page and looked at it and we thought as a consumer what would a consumer think feel and see what’s their experience also known as UX what’s their experience when they come to the site and we looked at this site and immediately we made a fist and punched ourselves in the face because we didn’t have a buy now button on one of our product pages so they had to three times click on a product to actually purchase rather than one to two clicks we made it much harder on ourselves thus we had a high exit rate because people were educated on the product but weren’t buying we made that slight change after we had a bloody nose and a black eye beating ourselves up and boom immediately volume went up so knowing that sometimes with an agency they know that if they’re really really good at e -commerce but again that can fall through the wayside even for the best companies so having a fractional cmo that’s looking at your big picture that’s one of the reasons why now i want to kind of go back to broad stroke of when we’ve talked a lot about how to hire an agency what to look for how to achieve better results i created a program 10 years ago because i was driving from washington dc after teaching a conference back to dallas where i currently live and it kind of hit me in the forehead of man i really wish i could show people what i do and how i do it how effective i am and i came up with a program that i still run from time to time that i call test before you invest and it essentially becomes a strategy of When it was someone on a short basis to identify and set goals and see how well they achieve those goals in a 30 or 60 day span and don’t commit to them for a year or two or five years like some agencies want you to do, they tell you, you can’t achieve anything in six months.

Josh Ramsey

Maybe I can’t achieve anything, but I can for sure know if they’re doing their job or not in six months. And that’s why I use a program called Test Before He Invest. Now, in today’s age, no matter what program you work in, I don’t do long term contracts like most agencies simply because if I’m not doing a good job, I want to be fired.

Josh Ramsey

You know, I’m proud of many things, but one specific, I’m extremely proud that over all the years of me working online in digital marketing, I don’t have one negative comment out there on the World Wide Web.

Josh Ramsey

You can search as much as you want, but it is extremely rare that you don’t have a negative comment working in the world I do. And part of that is I’ve refunded money when I haven’t done a good job, and I do short term programs.

Josh Ramsey

If you don’t feel like I’m doing a good job, fire me. Now, I share this primarily so that the expectation is set by anyone listening to this podcast. They understand what is out there, what options does that small business owner have?

Josh Ramsey

Do they have to commit to one year and pray every night on Bended Me until their knees are bloody that something’s going to work and they have another six months to go and they’re not getting anything from it?

Josh Ramsey

The answer is no. There’s not a lot of agencies that do what I do as far as short term or 30 -day contracts, but they are out there. You just have to look for them, find them, test them, set up your goals, and everything else we’ve been talking about, which has been, in my opinion, a great conversation for business owners to know this information, for them to identify, hey, there’s some better options out there, rather than just getting stuck with the average Joe and feeling like they’re getting, you know, I hope this is okay word or you can bleep it out, other than knowing that they’re getting screwed by some other agency, you know?

Josh Ramsey

They’ll get screwed by what they’re doing, you know, that’s kind of the deal. The other thing, let me follow up and finish out with answering your question. Tracking as a fractional CMO or even a business owner, doing this yourself, set up a CRM, and a CRM will allow you to load in leads and track them from lead source, and if you can’t pay for a CRM, there are some free ones out there, but if you don’t want to pay for it if it’s too complex, start an Excel spreadsheet, and a lot of times you can do that through what most people use QuickBooks, most people have QuickBooks, and you can track your leads through QuickBooks, export your Excel spreadsheet, and then identify how much money did I spend this year or month or six months on this specific campaign, and how many leads came from it.

Josh Ramsey

Be careful, one asterisk, as I turn the mic over to you. One asterisk there is, with your website and your online presence, you are paying for an online business card. People that even know you don’t just count, okay, well, I had X sales or X visitors, so I’m going to count that towards it, but the payoff wasn’t high enough.

Josh Ramsey

Keep in mind that a good website, a clean, clear, crisp, high -level looking and functioning website is extremely important, and you need to allocate an earmark, part of your budget that you’re paying an ad agency to, earmark part of that percentage.

Josh Ramsey

I would typically say 20 to 30 percent you should allocate as a general footer of, I’ve got a good website, it’s fast, it’s clean, it works, and people like it to identify that.

SEAN CLARK

God, crikey, there was a lot in there. So to come back on some of that stuff, the first one is what you alluded to was conversion rate optimization. I’m absolutely a big fan of that. Because if you can increase your conversion rate by 10%, that’s saved at money, whether it be organic or otherwise.

SEAN CLARK

Better experience leads to higher conversions. CRMs, you might not think if you run an e -commerce site that you need a CRM, but there’s CRMs like Infusionsoft out there that work well with small businesses and e -commerce sites.

SEAN CLARK

They’re really cool. Free ones, Zoho, do a starter one for free. HubSpot now got a free for life CRM. If you don’t know HubSpot, they’re an inbound or used to be known as an inbound marketing agency.

SEAN CLARK

They’re pretty cool. Their top end stuff is something like $800 a month. So free CRM offer them is something. God, there was just so much in there. Where to dive and delve first. But I suppose it’s coming off of the CRM thing because we say about generating leads. 

SEAN CLARK

Now, I’ve worked with clients on this before. We generate the lead, query goes to them and they say, well, you don’t get any sales. But the most important part of the list generation system is the follow -up afterwards.

SEAN CLARK

I mean, if you put any systems in place, what do you encourage in terms of the business owners in terms of their follow -up process?

Josh Ramsey

Yes, so again, I love the path here. Sorry that I gave you so much info. I’ll try to shorten my answers for you. Be a little more precise on it, but yeah, so I created, you talked and spoke about in the very beginning some programs and coded programs that I’ve built over the years.

Josh Ramsey

One of them that I built is called Fireproof Follow -Up. And essentially it’s meant to help the business owner because business owners go through waves. You work hard, you generate a lot of leads, you work on the sales, you work on the fulfillment.

Josh Ramsey

And while you’re working on the fulfillment, all of a sudden your leads go down because you haven’t focused on following up and dealing with it. So I created Fireproof Follow -Up because we need to keep a mainstream flow.

Josh Ramsey

So you also alluded to, I built a CRM. This is just so people have an idea. For $100 I have a CRM and Fireproof Follow -Up and they work together. And the reason I built these two is because you have the brain, which is the CRM, and then you have the mechanism that follows up with the leads as the Fireproof Follow -Up.

Josh Ramsey

So setting up the system, and there are other programs out there, so I’m only gonna speak to what I’ve done and what I’ve built, okay? So take that with a great assault. But the Fireproof Follow -Up program allows you to set up marketing specifically to certain leads and it does it over a period of time.

Josh Ramsey

So you can set it up to run every eight days, every two days, whatever you want it to do over whatever period of time. And you can set it to do a postcard. You can set it to do some other type of mail or a box or a present type box or even an email.

Josh Ramsey

And the nice thing about a program like that is essentially you’re just saying in front of the customer, you’re building your brand at a very low conversion rate and as you build that brand it can help be top of mind.

Josh Ramsey

You know, I sometimes get emails that I talked to someone eight months ago, wasn’t really ready to do anything with them, but in eight months I got three emails. In that third email I go, wow, yeah, I wanted to talk to that guy.

Josh Ramsey

I didn’t have time eight months ago. It wasn’t something top of mind, but now it is. Where people make mistakes is that they feel like they need to blow someone’s email up every month, three times a month or two times a month and that’s a mistake because then people opt out.

Josh Ramsey

And when they opt out, you lose your opportunity in eight months when they do wanna talk to you. So I prefer to scale that back in maybe once every two months or once every three months because when you do that over a long period of time, they’re gonna run into times and you’re gonna get that right time, right place option where people go, oh yeah, I was looking for that and they can then contact you.

SEAN CLARK

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I’m a really big fan of is remarketing as well. So for those that are not familiar, you drive someone to your website, they’re not ready to buy or inquire.

SEAN CLARK

And, you know, with their permission nowadays, you drop a little cookie and it follows them around the web and you can then show them ads on certain sites. You know, Facebook, LinkedIn allow you to do it, even Twitter, and of course, Google do.

SEAN CLARK

And it’s a lovely, lovely, soft approach. But you talked about physical stuff there. So your system is actually built into sending physical mail, postcards and gifts.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah let me just touch on the retargeting. Make sure that you’re paying attention to the time frame of the buyer. Educational spectrums is when they identify what you have and when they’re actually going to purchase.

Josh Ramsey

So a plumber is like a 24 hour turnaround right. Pest control is probably like a 24 to 48 turnaround. But buying a car oftentimes is like a two to three month. Buying a house can sometimes be a year or two years.

Josh Ramsey

So you know keep in mind what that educational spectrum is. But yeah going back to the fireproof follow up strategy. Quick story I had a pest control company come to me in 2012 and they wanted to target a specific group of people and they wanted to stay in front of them.

Josh Ramsey

They wanted to market to them and get their attention and let them know who they were. So we started off by sending a postcard and this program did this automatically. But by getting a postcard we were looking for bounce back wrong addresses wrong people return to sender.

Josh Ramsey

And we did it as cheap as possible to send out a postcard just to see if it worked or not. The next step we sent out a little bit more comprehensive mail piece that we knew would actually land in the prospect’s lap.

Josh Ramsey

The problem that we know oftentimes can happen is they throw it away. But what we’ve now achieved is we’ve helped them identify their brand. What is their brand. Who are we as a company that is trying to sell to you.

Josh Ramsey

Then we again this is where your strategy can change. So I’m going to fast forward some of this. We ended up sending them a box and with this specific strategy we took a six inch roach and a six inch plastic rat and we painted our logo on the roach along with our phone number and we mailed this to people with a postcard.

Josh Ramsey

And when we sent this out we knew what our ROI was. So we had set specifically what we’re going to spend on the entire campaign. What’s the dropout rate. How many people are we going to send the bots to.

Josh Ramsey

Are they qualified. So we figured all this information out. We knew we needed one new client to break even and anything above one client. We knew we made money. So when we hit that box we started with 150.

Josh Ramsey

We ended up sending out 20 boxes. And when we sent that box out immediately within 24 hours of that box landing we had eight phone calls. We ended up closing in the end of the entire campaign. We ended up closing 12 new accounts.

Josh Ramsey

So the ROI was tremendous. Now keep in mind the next year the business owner said that he knew better. So he wanted to put in a jump drive into the box. We sold zero. It was a complete flop. So just the strategy the little pieces of mailing these items out can be extremely effective but you can’t just waste money.

Josh Ramsey

You have to have a specific plan. You have to have a specific modification to your plan of knowing what your leverage points are. What are we hitting the pain points. A lot of little details go into that. 

Josh Ramsey

It was a spectacular campaign. The next best campaign we did for him was in year three. And again this was pest control. We wanted to advertise bed bugs. So we put a plastic ziplock bag and a note in the ziplock.

Josh Ramsey

And it said caution live bed bugs so you know what they look like. Then we ripped off a corner of the ziplock bag by hand. So it looked like it was torn. And they so it looked like they escaped. And people called us and were just blowing us up like just freaking out.

Josh Ramsey

And we told them like hey it was a joke but we did it all purpose just to get you on the phone. We sold several accounts off of that. We probably kind of picked off a few people. But you know what that’s part of marketing is I talk about a scenario called interrupt engage educate and offer.

Josh Ramsey

And your interrupt has got to break through the clutter of the marketing. You know if you’re driving down the street can you name all the billboards that you pass on your way to work every day. Oftentimes you can’t because there’s so much clutter in the marketplace that we don’t pay attention to it being interrupted by something. 

Josh Ramsey

The engagement becomes even harder because now we have to show them why there’s value in talking to us. Once they find that value the education is what most people jump to hey be educated about my product.

Josh Ramsey

So they over talk over hype their product and they use platitudes to do that. And then we have to move to an easy to handle offer. What’s easy that I can get involved with to test this product out to know if it really does fit and do what you said.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s the four steps to buying any product and marketing your product.

SEAN CLARK

I love the bedbugs tactic. It’s just brilliant. I mean, the postal service would have been on your back quite literally if you had been sending live bedbugs, I’m sure, through the post service. They wouldn’t like that too much.

Josh Ramsey

No, no actually

SEAN CLARK

I mean the nearest we got to that was involved in a campaign where the end point was sending toilet rolls out to people and that went down quite well. That got a good laugh, but like you say, it’s causing an interruption and that deviation.

SEAN CLARK

And it’s surprising really how well offline tactics can still work if they’re thought through. If they’re thought through in that way, they can really, really still work. Now Josh, you’ve got a book.

SEAN CLARK

Should we talk a bit about your book?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah so I just published this book and it’s the title of it is how some SEO companies disguise laziness and hide poor strategies so it’s a step -to -step guide on winning online there’s about 15 chapters in it and some of them talk about a lot about what we’ve been talking about how to write your marketing that educational spectrum you know there’s a lot of different chapters in here that they cover writing content marketing tools and how to track SEO you know brain -based marketing how to identify the user experience and write content for a good for good SEO growth and a lot more like I said there’s about 15 chapters to the book that cover all different types of marketing.

SEAN CLARK

Okay, is that book available online?

Josh Ramsey

It’s available on my website for just a couple of bucks. And if people hear your podcast and reach out to me and mention your podcast, be happy to mail them a hard copy book for free.

SEAN CLARK

Oh, that’s absolutely awesome and what are the benefits they’re going to get from the book? Are they going to understand in more depth some of the things that we’ve spoken about today?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, they’re going to understand, you know, I start off the whole book by talking about how to identify how to hire the right ad agency and hold them accountable. So that’s where the book starts. They’ll learn how to actually write content that follows the step to step path of interrupt and engage audience to generate more leads so that audience members understand what they’re reading and why they’re reading it very quickly.

Josh Ramsey

So there’s, they would literally, I believe, if they followed and read through the chapters, they’re going to be able to write content better, hold agencies accountable, identify what SEO really is, how it should work, and they would really ultimately be able to write their own marketing plan at a base level, so that at least a small business owner could have a better, well thought out marketing plan put together to achieve better results.

Josh Ramsey

Fantastic.

SEAN CLARK

So if they’re interested in that, where should they go?

Josh Ramsey

They can go to my website, it’s called jrcmo .com. So Josh Ramsey, but it’s jrcmo .com. And there’s some of my tools that I have spoken to. We’re gonna be launching some additional tools in the next few months.

Josh Ramsey

There’s the SEO library that you and I spoke to. That library is there so people can identify every element, every core element of SEO. And they can get the book and there’s also free chapters that they can download on the website.

Josh Ramsey

So if they just wanna pick up one specific chapter, then they can flip through the site and then they can learn a little bit more. We’re publishing blogs all the time so they can read a lot of additional content on the site.

SEAN CLARK

And do you have any availability at the moment if people want to speak to you in more depth?

Josh Ramsey

Absolutely. You can actually grab my cell phone from my website and you can text me. And, you know, I make time, I carve out time, I work a lot of hours. But I love what I do. I enjoy what I do. My kids like to tell me, you know, Daddy, stay at home more.

Josh Ramsey

I travel and speak at a lot of engagements. And, you know, I right now, where it is, is I do have time, I do have blocks of time available and coaching programs available for people looking for an ad agency, you can reach out to my ad agency directly to get faster information.

Josh Ramsey

That company is strategic point marketing .com. So you can reach out to them and speak with them. Or again, you can text me and ask me some questions. I’m happy to do the best I can to answer texting me is going to get a faster response.

Josh Ramsey

But again, I’d really love for them to mention this podcast so that I can call you back and say, hey, you know,

SEAN CLARK

No, text is a good idea. It avoids the spam box, doesn’t it? Text it straight in.

Josh Ramsey

You can email me from the website. There’s a lot of different ways I make myself pretty available. I have a Facebook page as well so that they can reach out that way. So I make myself pretty available.

Josh Ramsey

I love talking to people. I’ve found that the best CEOs, the best entrepreneurs and the most brilliant minds make themself available to the public. You just have to look for them. But people like Mark Cuban, he reads 95% of his emails that come through.

Josh Ramsey

If they go to spam, they go to spam. And it takes some time to go through them, but some brilliant minds, when you have their email address and you find and dig up how to contact them, they respond. So again, I like to pattern myself after successful people.

Josh Ramsey

There’s not a reinvention of the wheel when it comes to success. It’s number one, hard work. And then after that, it becomes the elements of what hard work looks like.

SEAN CLARK

Absolutely. And we’ll put all links to all of those resources in the show notes. Make sure you’ve got a link to the website, to the book area and to the agency for Joss. That’s brilliant. Thank you ever so much, Joss.

SEAN CLARK

I mean, that was really insightful. It was a great chat. It was almost a fireside chat, really, talking about stuff. No, I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate it. No, it’s really, really good. And thanks a lot, guys, for listening.

SEAN CLARK

I hope you get some benefit from there, some lovely little gems in there and obviously some great resources. Nip over to Josh’s website, grab a copy of the book, individual chapters, if you like. And if you’ve got any questions, as Josh has, you just text him and ask them.

SEAN CLARK

Absolutely brilliant. A little ask from me. If anyone’s been listening to the show for any length of time, you will know that come next April, I will be doing a silly run across the Sahara Desert, six days, five marathons, back to back, carrying my own gear, getting very hot and very tired.

SEAN CLARK

And actually, I’ll be offline for the whole week. So you won’t be able to contact me. But if you’re interested in what I’m doing, if you’d like to support the cause, we are supporting veterans, ex -military personnel who are finding it hard, difficult to get back into work after leaving the services.

SEAN CLARK

Then please nip over to MDSpodcast .com, where you can hear some of the stories. I interview some of the participants that are taking part with us next year. And the latest one is awesome. A guy called Duncan Slater, double amputee, he’s done the marathon desalblies two times already.

SEAN CLARK

Absolutely awesome, awesome guy. He talks about his experience and everything. So please nip over to MDSpodcast .com. Listen to the show. If you feel inclined, then donations are accepted, gratefully accepted.

SEAN CLARK

If you can’t afford a donation, just share the link. Be absolutely grateful of that. And for this show, this show lives on love. Just any reviews you’d like to leave on any of the platforms. We’re on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts.

SEAN CLARK

These are stitcher if it still exists. Yeah, it does still exist. You’ll find us everywhere. So please, guys, leave a review. Thanks for listening. Until next time. Thank you very much for listening.

SEAN CLARK

Cheers. Bye.

SEAN CLARK

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SEAN CLARK

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