Marketing Expert, Entrepreneur, and SEO Author on The Business Power Hour

Summary

The interview focused on marketing strategies, with Joshua Ramsey sharing his expertise from over two decades in the field. Key points included the importance of having a clear marketing plan, understanding your target audience (avatars/buyer personas), crafting effective messaging, and measuring success through KPIs. Ramsey emphasized creating content that interrupts, engages, educates, and has a call-to-action. He discussed SEO tactics like keyword density, link building, and user experience. The conversation also covered social media marketing, leveraging unique selling propositions, and the role of AI in marketing.

Chapters

 According to Deb Krier, marketing is the most important thing a company needs to be doing, but unfortunately, many companies either skip it or do it wrong.

 This is a rhetorical question to introduce the topic of marketing strategies for business success.

Joshua Ramsey started his career in the late 1990s selling traditional media like print, TV, and transit advertising.

He then transitioned to working at an ad agency as a junior project manager, where he learned how to craft better messaging.

 This experience led him to understand the importance of strategic messaging over tactical placement.

Ramsey explains that marketing principles don’t change, but the situation, company, and messaging do.

He emphasizes understanding the advantages of ownership, objections, and vendor selection from the customer’s perspective.

Effective messaging matches the customer’s perception and overcomes their objections.

Ramsey’s new ebook discusses how some SEO companies disguise laziness and hide poor strategies, which ties into the discussion on the importance of understanding and implementing effective SEO tactics.

Ramsey explains the four principles of a good headline: interrupt, engage, educate, and call-to-action.

A good headline interrupts the monotony, engages the reader, educates them, and includes a call-to-action.

Headlines should be crafted with the target audience (avatar/buyer persona) in mind and overcome objections.

Ramsey’s final thoughts emphasize the importance of having a marketing plan before hiring an agency or consultant.

The plan should be built around the company’s needs and wants, with a clear understanding of the unique selling proposition and target audience.

He also cautions against spending money on tactics like link building before optimizing on-page SEO and website content.

Action Items

Transcript

Deb Krier

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Every day there are countless books and articles that are published offering the key on how to make your business a success. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, trying to keep up and run your business. 

Deb Krier

That’s why Deb Krier created the Business Power Hour. Keep up on the latest trends, best practices, and techniques for how to make your business a success. Let the Business Power Hour do the heavy work for you.

Deb Krier

Good morning, good morning. I am Deb Krier and I am passionate about giving professionals the tools that they need to make themselves and their businesses as successful as possible. And today we’re going to be talking about what is near and dear to my heart, marketing.

Deb Krier

You know, that is what I do by trade. It is what I have done for a number of years. And you know, it’s, to me it is the most important thing that a company needs to be doing. And unfortunately, it’s one of the things that companies either totally skip or do wrong.

Deb Krier

So please join me in welcoming Joshua Ramsey to our program today. Welcome Joshua, how are you? Thank you

Josh Ramsey

I think that I’m doing great. Thanks for having me today. I appreciate it.

Deb Krier

Great, great. Well, let me tell folks a little bit about you and then we will jump into this. So Joshua Ramsey is a seasoned marketing professional with over two decades of experience in media advertising and agency leadership.

Deb Krier

Starting as a junior project manager, he swiftly climbed the ranks to become vice president of marketing and sales before founding Strategic Point Marketing, catering to small local businesses. In 2018, he launched JRCMO, a fractional CMO consultancy focusing on optimizing marketing strategies for companies.

Deb Krier

His notable clients include Centrocon, Panorama, North America SRSI, Warehouse Automation and A -Lert Roofing and Metal Buildings where his expertise has been instrumental in driving success. So again, Joshua, welcome.

Josh Ramsey

Thanks for having me. I’m excited. I love these types of conversations.

Deb Krier

I love it. So cool. So cool. Well, and I also need to mention you have a brand new ebook out. That is how some SEO companies disguise laziness. There it is. There it is. And hide poor strategies. So we’re going to talk a lot about SEO, because I think it is one of the absolute most misunderstood things, and most ignored.

Deb Krier

So we’re going to talk a lot about that. But tell us a little bit more about how it is that you got to where you are today. .

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, so again, thanks for having me. I mean, it’s always great to share information. And my goal, I think in my story, my narrative, I think it’ll kind of start to help people understand why I do what I do and how I work.

Josh Ramsey

So if you date back to the late 90s, I was selling media. So when I started my career, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I wanted to get into sales, I was just great at working with you.

Deb Krier

Get into sales

Josh Ramsey

I just, I enjoyed it, you know, um, my uncle always told me that I had the gift of gab, that was his statement. So he was like, somewhere, this guy, he’s just going to go top, you know, and I was six years old now and, uh, she’s got the same thing.

Josh Ramsey

She’s just like me. You know what I mean? So there’s always a conversation to be had. So, uh, in the nineties, I jumped into sales and I went to work for companies like Lamar below, uh, other media powerhouses, doing transit advertising, television, print, uh, you know, any type of traditional media.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, exactly. That’s it. That’s it.

Josh Ramsey

This was before the internet. .

Deb Krier

Internet had been invented.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. And then Al, Al Gore and I got together. We created the internet and then Google took it to the next level, you know? Um, but yeah, you know, so I was doing media, but, but it was before it was about the time the internet was coming up.

Josh Ramsey

But what I found was frustration and the frustration wasn’t that I wasn’t able to sell. I was able to sell the frustration was that clients weren’t staying with me and I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t make sense.

Josh Ramsey

Like, why am I doing great? I believe in what I’m doing. I believe in what I’m selling, where I’m placing the media, but it didn’t work. So I said, randomly to one of my friends one day, I need to do something different.

Josh Ramsey

This is frustrating that I keep losing clients. So he said, Hey, why don’t you come interview at this ad agency? Okay. So I went to work for an ad agency as a junior project manager, but my business acumen just, you know, I knew it.

Josh Ramsey

I knew how to place media. What I learned at that agency was how to craft messaging better. And that’s a lot of what I teach today. You were just to simplify everything down to like, what do you do now is that I figured out in this time that there’s two ways to do marketing.

Josh Ramsey

Everyone thinks marketing is just lead generation and they don’t have a lot of substance to understanding what marketing really is. But I work on principles and strategies that I’ve developed over many years, starting in 2003 in the agency world, understanding that when you as a business owner go, you want to increase your business, right?

Josh Ramsey

And you want to place marketing and get leads in the door. Oftentimes you think about the tactical marketing, which is the placement of your message, right? But oftentimes you don’t think about your strategic message.

Josh Ramsey

That’s more important than your tactical placement. So the first step that I teach business owners is separate tactical marketing and strategic messaging, and then start that place of building what’s called the USP or unique selling position.

Josh Ramsey

So my career basically came from sales, losing clients to being on the agency side and helping clients develop the best messaging and the best platform. That’s when really the web in 2003 to 2008 started taking off.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s really when I started understanding that next level and really elevating myself and then helping clients grow as well.

Deb Krier

I love it. Very cool. Well, you know, you mentioned content and you talk about it in your book. And one of the things that I loved was in the book you talk about, you know, it is so important to have the right message.

Deb Krier

And so many companies have no idea, you know, they’re like, buy from me because I have the best stuff. But it’s not only that it’s when is the right time to approach them with the message. So talk to us more about that, because I love that. .

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. I mean, so that’s loaded and you could take that about 500 different directions. What I’ve learned is marketing doesn’t change, the situation changes, the company changes, the, the, the marketing.

Deb Krier

Marketing is marketing.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, but the morals, ethics, and values of the company are what makes that company unique. That uniqueness, the ethics, morals, and values is what makes it unique and then how do you explain it? So Zig Ziglar used to say, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

Josh Ramsey

I’ve taken that and put it into what we call 2024. And my statement is it’s not what you say, it’s not how you say it, it’s what’s perceived by your audience. So now your communication has to match whatever the perception should be.

Josh Ramsey

And you know, I’ll just use an example that I got going with a company, still a client now, almost two years in, and they’re a drug trial science company. When they came to me, they said, hey, we’re trying to generate leads.

Josh Ramsey

We need, you know, people coming in and going through the trial process. So here are our numbers, here’s what we need to do. I looked at their tactical placement of their marketing message. And here was a major problem.

Josh Ramsey

When I looked at their AdWords, they had a 98% bounce rate. They were spending over $12 ,000 a month in placing AdWords online, just for them, the Dallas Fort Worth area. It was terrible. They were not getting anything for a large amount of money.

Josh Ramsey

The number one thing that I found was the problem is that their key words that they were focusing on were migraines, solutions for migraines, organic solutions for migraines, home remedy for migraines.

Josh Ramsey

But when people would click the link and go to that webpage, the webpage didn’t even talk about migraines or homepage for the drug trial science company.

Deb Krier

And so people went, I’m confused, click the next link.

Josh Ramsey

And even then it wasn’t even, even if they would have put migraines on the page, it was still a problem because they’re still speaking about drug trial science. Right. They, they wanted

Deb Krier

About migraines, period

Josh Ramsey

Once, but they wanted organic information. They wanted home remedies. So the messaging change that we made immediately was, and this took our bounce rate from a 98% to a 78% bounce rate by making one change.

Josh Ramsey

And it was that we still talked about drug trial science, but our headlines on the page when people landed were along the lines and we ran a lot of different tests. So I’m only frustrated with migraines or migraines.

Josh Ramsey

Right. The things that people are saying. Right. We’re trying to get on the same page. Right. I think Jay Abraham said it. He said, if you want the key to marketing, it’s real simple. Think about what the user’s thinking and say that in your marketing.

Josh Ramsey

And it is to a level, it is that easy because once you’ve drawn someone in your messaging can move through that. Right. But I’m going to take your messaging just a little bit in a potentially a little bit of a different direction for people to understand this.

Josh Ramsey

Your messaging matters and how you can grade your own messaging is real simple. It’s called UX user experience. Google does a lot of things. And a lot of times Google doesn’t explain what they do and why this goes to SEO as we talk about it, all the different spider webs of transition that we can have in this conversation.

Josh Ramsey

But I say logically, I would put out there to anyone listening or watching this podcast and say, logically, consider this. Do you think that a powerhouse like Google puts millions and billions of dollars into a program called Google analytics, now called GA4 in this version.

Josh Ramsey

And they track certain metrics. And one of the key metrics that is on the homepage when you look at GA4 is how many visitors and their time session. Right. Time spent there. Right. So if your messaging doesn’t work, they bounce.

Josh Ramsey

Right.

Deb Krier

And then Google goes, well, why should we show you in a search? 

Josh Ramsey

Because when I sit in conferences, I say, I ask people, what does Google care about most? And the favorite answer of everyone is money. Say, no, not Google. I do what I learned from Google. And this is how I work.

Josh Ramsey

I work with a focus on user experience, because what I know is what I’ve seen Google prove, which is I give the best user experience people are going to come back and work with, right? They’re going to pay attention, they’re going to want more information, they’re going to want free information, they’re going to want to read what I publish, they’re going to want to work with me, right?

Josh Ramsey

And if I get the best user experience, that’s what happens. Right. That’s what I focus on the same thing in Google. And what Google knows is they make billions upon billions because they give a good user experience.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s why now people go Google it.

Deb Krier

Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s become the noun, the adjective, the verb, all of those things.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve gone down a lot of different roads, where do you want your pay?

Deb Krier

I love it. Well, I want to still focus on, well, you do have, you have this great chapter in your book on writing headlines. To me, content, you know, content really is king. And, you know, we don’t think about the headline.

Deb Krier

And, you know, it’s, which is funny, because we all know, that’s what we read, you know, that’s what catches our attention when we’re scrolling, is what it is, you know, all of those various things. But then when we go to write it ourselves, we write for me, because I have the greatest product in the world.

Deb Krier

So talk to us more about why it is absolutely critical to have a good headline, or let me tell you a great headline.

Josh Ramsey

So I feel like I’m gonna take you again a little bit of a different direction on that, because my first statement Deb, is I think what you and everyone knows, I know where you’re trying to get to, but let me say this, where you’re trying to get to is everyone understands why to have a good headline.

Josh Ramsey

They understand the engagement, but I think it’s more important to break it apart and understand the fundamentals of the record. How the heck do we do it? Right. So when you look at writing a good headline, you’re looking at writing the engagement, if you as a user look at most websites that you read, what you do is you look for the main idea, the sub bullet points that confirm the main idea.

Josh Ramsey

This is also known as confirmation bias. It’s a filtering of information to identify, is this what you want? You can tie that back to your reticular activator, which is what’s subconsciously scanning information as we move day to day to make buying decisions.

Josh Ramsey

Now, I always like to joke and laugh when I do conferences, because people will come in for an SEO conference and I’m teaching psychology. But psychology is the human behavior of buying. So when you simplify that even further down to the fundamentals, people make buying decisions and we have to think through why we make buying decisions.

Josh Ramsey

And it’s based on three things. The advantages of ownership. So why do we own this product? Why don’t we want to have- Why do we want it? The second one is objections. Objections are, I don’t want it because of this.

Josh Ramsey

The price, the flavor, the style, the look. All of those things. There’s a lot. And we’re gonna come back to objections and spend a lot of time. And then the last one is vendor selection. Who do I choose to buy this from?

Josh Ramsey

But no matter what you sell in the world, those three things are what apply. No matter what it is. A piece of gum, a bottle of water. Because you get a bottle of water, well, as a kid, we drink out of the water hose, right?

Josh Ramsey

We drink out of the sink. Now it’s like, okay, we have to have it filtered. Okay, well, do you want Fuji or what do you want?

Deb Krier

Hey, I drink flavored water.

Josh Ramsey

See? So you understand the benefits of water, but your objections now change. And my strategy that I teach is when you overcome those objections from the front end, people tend to favor you. Right. They put you on a different paradigm of understanding.

Josh Ramsey

They went, oh, you get me. But you show that you have the knowledge, right? I mean, I can, I’m going to give you an example that we may talk about five different times during our time today. But when I bought a house for the first time in 2009 with my wife, when we bought that house, she was in law school.

Josh Ramsey

I was now running my own company and I was a VP previously of a really large agency. So we both

Deb Krier

Or educated. Yeah, you should be smart people

Josh Ramsey

But when we bought this house, here’s what we didn’t know. We didn’t know that we had to go to a separate office and file for Homestead.

Deb Krier

No, because that was not your experience.

Josh Ramsey

I spoke with a real estate agent yesterday and she laughed over the phone when I told her that. And I told her, I said, I expect you to laugh. I think it’s funny, but I also think it’s more funny that you think it’s so funny.

Josh Ramsey

Right. Because I looked at your PR and marketing, I told this real estate person, I looked at your PR and marketing, I’ve looked at everything that you do and you are so full of platitudes, you look and sound like everyone else online.

Josh Ramsey

Right. I’m like, so what are you telling me? Why am I going to pick you? You just touched on it, right? Throughout this call, you talked about this, this podcast, you touched on, you sounded like everyone else, so why am I going to choose you?

Josh Ramsey

So you’re making it now based on emotion rather than facts and confidence. So now when we go back to full circle, to how do you build your headline? There are headline starters, there are ways to write headlines.

Josh Ramsey

I have it in the book. I talk about the different ways to write headlines and the starters and what to think about, but just in this part of the podcast, understanding the objections that your consumer is going to have, and we can talk about this if you want as well, but now I often work on avatars, avatars are buyer personas.

Josh Ramsey

Yes. Because when you identify that, now you’re building out that Susie Q likes to read, loves cats, loves flowers. Now if we know migraines can tie to flowers and cats, or they advertise migraines and cats.

Josh Ramsey

You see what I mean? Now you can speak to your audience on where they’re at, where they’re living, what their life is, and you put your information into their life. Now you’ve targeted tactically for your placement and your strategic message is written well because you understand the objections, you don’t want to get into the vendor selection because now you’re playing the pricing game, you’re like, oh, well, let me give you 20%.

Josh Ramsey

Okay. 25%. None of us want to do that as business owners. We want to show value, our price point, but how you build that value in that price point comes back to objections and properly managing those objections.

Deb Krier

Now, Deb, will you indulge me on one more thing? Of course. Okay. So I’m going to promote the book and here’s one reason why. In my first chapter, I give five.

Deb Krier

Oh, they’re right here in front of me. I have it open

Josh Ramsey

Of points on how to hire an ad agency. Now, what I’m doing myself, right? I tell people I eat my own dog food. I not only publish it, but I actually do it as well. Right? But when we talk about how to position what I’m doing in this book, I’m educating people on how to go hire the right ad agent.

Josh Ramsey

Right. Because I’m overcoming objections and I’m explaining, Hey, Deb, you want to hire an ad agency. Here are the problems you may run into. Right. Be aware of these problems. And as you learn those problems, all of a sudden I become the authority.

Deb Krier

Right. Yeah. Because you’re not going to say this is a problem if you’re not the one who solves it.

Josh Ramsey

Exactly. So I spoke years back, I worked with, I do a lot of training with companies and I was, I had an ad agency hire me to train and work with their salespeople. And a huge argument broke out with a couple of the salespeople with me involved where it was, why would we give them that objection?

Josh Ramsey

Why would we tell them an objection? Right. Why are we going to

Deb Krier

To point it out.

Josh Ramsey

And I just simply said, because if you don’t, and I’m going against you, I will. So you have to think that your competition is going to be just as sharp. And you need to know those objections and already be ready to overcome them.

Josh Ramsey

Mm hmm.

Josh Ramsey

Therefore you don’t worry about vendor selection. You don’t worry about anything other than I made the sale. I’m good. I’m gonna move on. In that realm, Deb, I’m gonna pick you down one more row, is that okay?

Josh Ramsey

That’s perfect. Here’s I think the biggest thing that’s not in the book. I need to write a second book now. But here’s one of the light bulb moments that I had in my career, just in the last year, year and a half.

Josh Ramsey

Agencies will come sell you what they’re good at, not necessarily what you need.

Deb Krier

Right. Which is human nature, right? You know, I’m good at this, and I don’t want to talk about that over there.

Josh Ramsey

So when you as a business owner say, I want to grow my business, you call up an ad agency and you go, hey, can you promote my business? Yeah, yeah, we can do that. Yeah, sure. Put together a pitch, give it to them.

Josh Ramsey

They come in and pitch what they’re good at. That’s the difference right there in between a fractional chief marketing officer and an ad agency. A CMO comes in and sits with the business owner and says, hey, this is what we need to do to get the results that you, the CEO want.

Josh Ramsey

These are the things that we need to do. This is the type of agency. They build you a plan. Then the CEO can go interview the agency and make a decision.

Deb Krier

Yeah, and get the one that fits what it is that you need. And of course, the tricky thing is so many companies don’t know what they need.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s why you don’t have that clear, what I call the plain English marketing plan, the simplified marketing plan that someone can look at and go, this is what I need. So that’s the first, when I work with people, that’s the first thing.

Josh Ramsey

It’s a predetermined situation that anyone that I ever work with in any of my companies, they have to do first, which is either give me the clear plan that they’ve already put together or work with me to create that plan.

Josh Ramsey

It’s GPS, right? You don’t.

Deb Krier

Get in your car and say, take me wherever.

Josh Ramsey

You’re gonna spend how many thousands of dollars with an ad agency and tactical placement of your marketing message with no plan no KPI it doesn’t make sense so that’s where you know again we’ve gone down so many different rabbit holes here which is great because it all does connect right all comes back to one thing so you know when you look at an ad agency now as we go back a little bit you said you wanted to spend a little bit of time on SEO your headlines so I’m gonna tie a few little pieces together right the rabbit holes I’m gonna kind of bring them back yeah we’re gonna gonna get yeah right so we talked about headlines we talked about avatar we talked about a lot of little pieces well when you want an agency to perform for you oftentimes an agency will say well it’s gonna take three six twelve months to get results right possibly but here’s what business owners don’t often realize there are KPI markers that they should be looking for and expecting that will show incremental growth right from the very start

Deb Krier

Mm -hmm.

Josh Ramsey

Right. Yeah. The question now becomes what are those KPI markers? Well, Deb, I’m not going to tell you or the audience what those KPI markers are on this one. We have to wait until you do another interview with me.

Josh Ramsey

Yep, of course.

Deb Krier

Fair enough? Yes, most definitely. Mm -hmm. Right.

Josh Ramsey

No, everyone stick around, I’ll tell you what they are.

Deb Krier

Yeah, yeah. But I always love having repeat guests, so that’s still.

Josh Ramsey

But on this part, the first thing to understand is you need to rank for a keyword to get an impression, to get a click. So we’re not even gonna talk about this end of the spectrum if you made a sale and you have money.

Josh Ramsey

We’re talking this end of the spectrum – where does it start?

Deb Krier

How do we even get them interested?

Josh Ramsey

So when we say, how do we get them interested? It’s not even getting them interested. It’s you showing up. So when you hire an SEO agency, we can go down a whole nother rabbit hole of what SEO is. Cause there’s two main ways to focus on SEO.

Josh Ramsey

But when we, before we even touch that, we’re going to talk about, you have to rank. If you’re not ranking at least in the top 100 for keywords, you can’t get that impression.

Deb Krier

Yeah, if you cannot be found, then, you know, it’s kind of, you know, say it’s a brick and mortar store. If you have no signage so people know where we are, then, you know, it’s going to be very difficult to do business.

Deb Krier

Not impossible, but difficult.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. Yeah. So when we, when we look at these steps, right? So we have to show up. Well now we could tie quickly that simply back over to the headlines or headlines using the right words, because now you’re talking about on page SEO, which would be H tags, metatags and content and what’s called density of the website.

Josh Ramsey

If we simplified for some of the listeners that may be the first steps into SEO what it is that understands this. So this is way too elementary for some people. I apologize, but for those people, it’s a good reminder that I’ve never learned about SEO.

Josh Ramsey

Here’s where it starts. You want to rank for a keyword, make sure that that word is used repetitively in the right terminology in the homepage of a website. Right. Now that may sound insane, but it’s more insane when I do audits of websites that people have built and their number one key word that they use the most is learn more.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. You sell eyeglasses and your first word is learn more. Right. No, it’s missed so much.

Deb Krier

Right. Well, or, you know, and I love the ones that go to the other extreme. Do you need glasses? We’ve got glasses here. Really come to us for glasses. No, no, it still needs to read well, or people are going to go, this is just weird.

Josh Ramsey

So, Deb, that’s a great segue into another thing that people don’t understand. As a consumer, Deb, just you and I sitting here talking, as a consumer, if we need to hire a plumber because our kitchen sink broke.

Deb Krier

Mm -hmm.

Josh Ramsey

How much education do we need legitimately? How much knowledge, education and bandwidth and mental capacity do we need to make a buying decision on a plumber?

Deb Krier

Mm -hmm.

Josh Ramsey

Not a ton. Yeah. And according to Google, it’s a third grade level. Third grade reading. Right. Now, Deb, if you and your husband decide that you want to do a self directed IRA. How much knowledge and bandwidth do you need to have?

Deb Krier

A lot more.

Josh Ramsey

A lot more than a third grade with a PhD level according to people’s statistics. So now you have to consider your content when you talk about eyeglasses, buy these eyeglasses, this, this, this. Well, you’re, you’re using the same concepts and principles of writing headlines, focusing on your avatar, your buyer persona, all these other details, right?

Josh Ramsey

Advantages of ownership, vendor selection. But the way you lay that content out, how many pages you need for a website, that’s totally different. So the same principles apply, but the tactics of it and the strategic message does change.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s kind of the principle of understanding. Google is reading your content and making a decision. So everyone could talk about AI nowadays, like it’s something brand new. No, it exists.

Deb Krier

For years, folks.

Josh Ramsey

Anyone ever gone to the Word document and you type something in, it gives you autocorrect? And it gives, yeah, you know, it makes you, yeah.

Deb Krier

Mm -hmm, that’s AI.

Josh Ramsey

It is, right? Google. Auto Populate when we start typing something in. That’s AI. It predicts basic human behavior. So it’s fun to talk about. It’s fun that there’s Google tools. It’s fun that it’s made life a little easier with some of this new explosion of AI, but it’s always been there.

Josh Ramsey

I think we’ll get too enamored with this concept of what AI is. And it’s great knowing the right tools and not overspending, I believe, because I teach AI conferences, but knowing the right tools and not overspending are the number one principles that I tell people.

Deb Krier

Oh, yeah. You know, and yeah, that, you know, that the AI rabbit hole is so much fun. In fact, I had to draft some marketing things for me earlier today. But, you know, it can, it can, it can help you generate the SEO, the keywords, I mean, all of those things, you know, and I was thinking back to when, you know, Al Gore first invented all of this.

Deb Krier

And we used to cheat on SEO, right? You put in your competitors names, especially your big competitors, you know, because you’re assuming somebody’s searching for them, you want to come up. And of course, Google got really smart.

Deb Krier

And went, No, no, in fact, they ding you, you know, you that’s that’s bad. No, that’s cheating. Or the people who would put the keywords in, you know, like, maybe they had a white background, they would use white text to say things, you know, and because you know, the, the, you know, the bots would see the text.

Deb Krier

I mean, we could not see it. But and so again, you know, and no, Google’s figured all those things out. It’s smarter that you’re the people who work there are really pretty smart cookies. But, you know, it is about having the right content, wherever it is that you’re doing on the internet or whatever, you know, and it’s funny as we record this Super Bowl was last weekend.

Deb Krier

So, you know, commercials, right? And, you know, and it was, I’m always fascinated with the Super Bowl commercials, because how many of them do we watch and then go, I have absolutely no idea what they were selling.

Deb Krier

You know, now you see Clydesdales, you go Budweiser. I mean, we’re just that’s, we know that Budweiser’s little Clydesdale, right? They don’t even have to say Budweiser, we go Clydesdales, you know. But yeah, I mean, so many of the ads this year, as soon as it was done, I thought I have no idea what that was for.

Deb Krier

So, you know, that’s the bright shiny object thing. We’re going after eyeballs, we’re going after people to say, hey, wasn’t this cute? And this is nothing new again. I mean, one of my favorite examples is the one, and I don’t even know now how old it is, the herding cats.

Deb Krier

Super Bowl commercial, where, you know, and it was for EDS, made absolutely no sense that those two were, but, you know, we obviously still remember herding cats. But that, I think, is one of the issues that we have with our headlines and our content.

Deb Krier

You know, we’re writing them to catch somebody’s attention, and then forgetting that, hello, we have something that we want to talk to you about.

Deb Krier

Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, that’s, we could transition that a little bit to engagement of your content, but now we can move into a little bit of the social side, right? So when we talk SEO, SEO, it can be and should be primarily around your website, but, but you have to think about, excuse me, you have to think about SEO and we have to think about the tactical placement to drive people to your site.

Josh Ramsey

So again, it’s not what you say. It’s not how you say it. It’s what’s perceived by your audience. Your website needs to be the center hub, the center mass of your entire unique selling position. It needs to have the spokes that allow great user engagement or users to click through and go somewhere.

Josh Ramsey

Right. So when you go plumber, plumber, how do you make your website not have a high bounce rate and have better engagement? That’s one of the hardest things to do with plumbers and having a low engagement rate.

Josh Ramsey

Real simple for you plumbers that may be listening, put in, you know, in your hero image or just below it and the top one third of your page, put in the most common problems and quick solutions, have people click and drive them to a page that says, you’re the most common problems and here’s fast solutions for it.

Josh Ramsey

Now people want a fast solution because if their kitchen seems broken, I got company coming and I’m water everywhere, right? You’re like, I don’t want my house to get ruined and you’re not going to come out at 1 a .m. 

Josh Ramsey

And I’m ready to go back to bed. It’s like, you know what I mean? Give them a quick. Right. That’s a better engagement. Now let’s go to social. Now if you take that same principle into social, the concept that a lot of people don’t follow in social is you have three seconds.

Josh Ramsey

There’s four principles in really pulling someone in with a good headline to cut. Okay. So let’s start there. Four principles. Interrupt. We have to break through the monotony. Right. Get their attention.

Josh Ramsey

Interrupt them. The second one is harder, but it’s the engagement. The engagement where they go, oh, okay, I’m going to do a little bit more. Right. Third one is education. You educate somebody. What you’re doing is you’re pulling them in on education and now you’re building the overcome objection.

Josh Ramsey

Now you’re telling them why you’re the professional, why you are the top person. And the last one is your call to action. That hook.

Deb Krier

And that gets forgotten so many times.

Josh Ramsey

Yep. So those are your four steps. So now if you translate that, you can translate that to websites. So let me do website real quick. And then let me move to the, uh, another, another direction. Right.

Josh Ramsey

So the website, you’re interrupt, engage and educate work like this. Your main headline is your interrupt subheadlines are the engaged. And then the educator, the smaller paragraphs, but you build your SEO keywords into each of those quickly, moving that to, to transition to social.

Josh Ramsey

You have three seconds to interrupt them. You have three more seconds to engage them. And then you have approximately 20 to 30 seconds to educate them.

Deb Krier

Because we all have the attention span of a gnat.

Josh Ramsey

But, and that’s where it comes in is if you oftentimes find yourself wanting to think through what I’m saying logically and building confirmation bias up, is Josh Ramsey really accurate with this or not, and everyone’s local brain, next time you look at videos on Instagram or Facebook or anything like that, see how much you scroll down and figure out and think about when you stopped, when you start to become engaged, what was it?

Josh Ramsey

It was your reticular activator of a certain person’s memory. You know what I mean? Like, why does Facebook do what they do? There’s a psychological rationale behind it. Why do they engage the way they do?

Deb Krier

Right. You know, and it’s about, as we said, getting their attention and then keeping it and and you’re sucking them in. Because we can all go somewhere else, you know, the long gone are the days when you have a unique product, right?

Deb Krier

There’s, you know, I don’t I cannot think of anything in the world that is a totally unique product. Somebody is the only one that offers it. No, I mean, it. Oh, you’ve got one. You’ve got one. So I’m going to promote

Josh Ramsey

Loader guy.

Deb Krier

Okay.

Josh Ramsey

Someone wants to know where this is or how to get it. You can contact me and I’ll put you in touch. But everyone knows what drywall is, right? Right, uh -huh. Behind me, it’s behind you. It’s around all of us that are in a house.

Josh Ramsey

One of the hardest things to do with drywall when you’re doing it is doing the corners.

Deb Krier

Than 90 degree corners. Making them nice and pretty.

Josh Ramsey

Because it takes a lot of time to put the paper and then tape it and then sand it and repaint it, right? Well, this guy came out with a product.

Deb Krier

Ah, he’s got a corner. Do that? Very cool. Isn’t that awesome? Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Well, he started out this product and he had no idea how to market it because he had a great product. So sometimes you have a great product, sometimes you have a product that has plumbing that anyone that knows plumbing knows how to do, or you have something unique.

Josh Ramsey

But again, it’s now how you position this, how do you sell it, how do you explain it? And this gentleman being an engineer, extremely smart, came up with this product, launched it, patented everything, right?

Josh Ramsey

But he had no idea how to sell it. He had no idea how to position it.

Deb Krier

How do you get and who? I mean, that’s the other thing. I mean, are you talking to the homeowner? Are you talking to the construction people? You know, that that comes back to the avatar.

Josh Ramsey

it does come back to the avatar. And then each avatar or buyer persona would be different. Now we talk about the offers and the opportunities, the lowest hanging fruit. So now you are trying to make different decisions.

Josh Ramsey

So Deb, I didn’t want to crash or rain on your parade of- I love it. Every now and then something is unique. But letting go to nothing is unique for a minute more because then here’s something that I love to say to people.

Josh Ramsey

Remember the old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a drink. Deb, I am the guy that people do not like. Here’s why I say that. Because I believe you can lead a horse to water and you can make it drink.

Josh Ramsey

Right. You have to have the right strategy. Yeah. But what does that look like? Run that horse. Don’t let it drink for two days straight. Lead that horse to water?

Deb Krier

Will drink. Mm hmm. Right. Right. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s and and the funny thing is that it sounds simple. And it is simple. And I think maybe that’s where we get caught up is we do try and make it more difficult.

Deb Krier

You know, it’s and a big part of that and I talk about this a lot on the program is, you know, when we first of all figuring out who you’re selling to, I mean, that is that is one of the biggest things.

Deb Krier

Because and I’m sure you have this happen all the time, you ask people who’s your target market, and they smile and they go everybody No, no, no, you know, and so they, you know, and of course, you think, well, I you know, if I limit who I’m marketing to, I’m limiting my sales.

Deb Krier

That’s fine. Those other people weren’t going to buy anyway. So it’s okay to not be talking to them. But you know, it’s, and then when you figure this out and this, this ties in with everything we’ve been talking about.

Deb Krier

So you’ve got it down to Susie Q, as you said, and you know that she likes this, this and this. If you talk about something totally different, Susie Q goes, that’s not for me. And off she goes. But if you talk about how, you know, her cat is the most important thing in the world to her.

Deb Krier

And how can she not have migraines, so she can enjoy more time with her cat, you captured her attention. You know, and, and yeah, and I mean, it is that simple, you know, but we do we’re like, okay, well, what causes migraines?

Deb Krier

And how can we, you know, we forget the cat even exists, or we talk about the dog and she’s like, yeah, and so yeah, you know, it’s, it’s kind of the old kiss principle, right? Keep it simple. And, you know, and that’s the thing.

Josh Ramsey

The right strategic message and the right tactically placed location, right? Right. And your strategic message can be modified and twisted and changed and adapted to fit in that tactical placement. But, you know, another principle that I’ve learned a long time ago is that out of a hundred percent of people that are going to buy from you, don’t focus on the bottom 20 and don’t focus on the top 20.

Josh Ramsey

Top 20 are always going to buy from you. Right. They they’ve got,

Deb Krier

Client loyalty or whatever that they’re going to go for.

Josh Ramsey

Middle 60 and your job in marketing is to persuade and influence that middle 60% lean your direction. And if you achieve that, that’s your focus. So yes, it is a kiss principle, but it’s knowing where you’re going to set your KPI markers.

Josh Ramsey

And I think, you know, I mean, I know we’re starting to get towards the end of this conversation and it’s been a lot of fun, but I would say another key thing for people to focus on, I’ve said it a little bit before, but I want to say very, very, very strongly right now.

Josh Ramsey

That is, you must build KPIs in marketing to hold everyone accountable. A KPI can be a lot of different things. A KPI is a key point indicator, but as we look at a key point indicator, it’s things like, are we getting the right key words and the right density on our website?

Josh Ramsey

KPI is, are we, we made a change to the website? Did it improve or did it decline? I tell people that work in my ad agency all the time. I want to see errors on the website. What? Why do you want to see an error on a website?

Josh Ramsey

Your job is to not have an error. Not correct. Your job is to make the errors because what happens is it shows Google that you’re working on it.

Deb Krier

Right. And Google likes fresh content.

Josh Ramsey

They’re looking for. So it also tells the client if they see errors come up and then go away, it’s what we call build it, break it, fix it. Build the website, you’ll look for the breaks, the cracks, the issues, you fix it, and then you do it again.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s when you know it’s working well. So those are the types of KPIs. Unfortunately, I’m gonna kick this back over to you, but unfortunately, I had a client sign up with me about eight months ago.

Josh Ramsey

And the unfortunate part of it was they have worked for six months with an ad agency and continue to decline.

Deb Krier

Stay the same, they declined. Yikes.

Josh Ramsey

Were sold on the idea that most people are sold on that please if everyone’s listening to this hear me loud and clear there are KPIs and measurables you do not need to wait 30 days 60 days or six months just measurables and see a turn you may not get immediate phone calls but there are KPI markers that you can identify depending on your business and what you’re doing even impressions I mean it’s insane to me that I sat down with a company that spending on average a quarter of a million dollars a month they called me and said hey can you do an audit for us I said absolutely I said an audit long story short because there was so much information one thing that blew my mind is they have a marketing director that’s been there for about a year and a half and I looked at the marketing director as nicely as I could and I said to the marketing director if I gave you $20 ,000 right now which to them $20 ,000 is a very small drop I gave you $20 ,000 right now where would you spend it to see a maximum return his response took him five to ten seconds to respond and when he did respond all he spoke about was I’m gonna go test this this and this I said you’ve already been testing do you not have something that specifically you know has worked for all the testing you’ve done and when a marketing director can’t turn around and give me that mm -hmm like that right business owner if that’s your marketing director you need to know not necessarily to replace that person but you need to know the type of person you have right I don’t like replacing people I like fixing what we have to make it more effective because if a business owner can work with me and afford even some of my lower rates in my lower pricing they’re affording something they can pay something that means they’ve done something right don’t change it right build on

Deb Krier

On it. Yeah. Well, and, you know, it comes back to a lot of times, they don’t know where they’re going, you know, they’re doing that whole GPS thing without telling it where they’re going. You know, or they have a marketing plan that is dusty and sits on the back counter, that somebody developed for them somewhere along the line.

Deb Krier

But they, they, they don’t know, they do not know where they’re going. And, and, you know, and more importantly, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you get there? And how can you measure it?

Deb Krier

I mean, you know, did you, did you get where you wanted to go, but you took so many detours that, you know, you know, and all of those things. And, and that’s, that’s not, again, that’s not hard to do.

Deb Krier

You know, now it does entail working with sales, you know, and the other parts of the company. And, you know, fortunately, I think we are finally getting away from the silos in the companies where, you know, sales never talks to marketing, who never talks to R&D, who, you know, all of those various things.

Deb Krier

But, you know, it’s just, they, they just don’t understand, you know, what they’re doing with all of this. And it’s, you know, it is, you know, you, you have to have those goals. And they, and you talk about this in the book, and we, you know, I talk about this a lot, they have to be measurable goals, folks.

Deb Krier

It’s not just, we need to increase sales, we need to get more people clicking on our website. Okay, what is more? And now for some people, more is 10. For somebody else, it might be 10 ,000. But that comes back to the avatar, are they the right 10 ,000?

Deb Krier

You know, if you’ve done something where people are just clicking to, you know, you know, for whatever reason, but they’re not going to get those next steps. So they’re not going to engage, they’re not going to, you know, read what you’ve got for education, and certainly they’re not going to buy, then again, you wasted that money.

Deb Krier

So if you had the right 10, maybe that was what you needed to do.

Josh Ramsey

And then there’s a logic behind where you’re testing. So when you’re doing something and you’re talking about, you know, did you get the right 10? Okay, take into consideration that you do a live broadcast in front of a jewelry store and you get more traffic, but your sales don’t necessarily increase for the amount of spin that you have.

Josh Ramsey

You might get the eyeballs, but you have to think about, are we getting the right audience? Are we getting the right people? Did that really work for us or not? And then setting some KPIs within that of, okay, how many new contacts did we get?

Josh Ramsey

How many new sales, new customers did we get? And how much information did we get? So maybe your KPI then is we got 30 ,000 new contacts cause we did a live remote broadcast on radio at one of our brick and mortar stores.

Josh Ramsey

You see what I mean? Like that can be a KPI, but projecting that KPI before you do it, not afterwards. Cause afterwards now it’s hindsight and you say, oh, well, we should have done that. Coming up with the plan first and executing the plan.

Josh Ramsey

That goes back to one of the first ones we spoke about.

Deb Krier

Right. You know, and let’s be honest, we don’t want to be wasting time and money. You know, that’s ultimately what this comes down to, you know, and so we’re not just, you know, throwing the darts at the dartboard, hoping we hit something.

Deb Krier

Because let’s be honest, everyone’s why you hit the target. But, you know, then the bad part is you go, what do we do? How do we do that? I don’t know. You know, but yeah, it’s all about this

Deb Krier

And it’s funny, another thing I was thinking of, you know, here we go squirrel, right? Or the rabbit hole. You know, and I am one of those, I mean, we, the keywords and the placement are not just on your website.

Deb Krier

You know, it’s, if you’re, you know, the plumber, you know, maybe his billboard is saying, you know, and, and, you know, is your sink backed up? Because, you know, when now, but, you know, if you’re driving, that might not be the thing, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re not really thinking about it.

Deb Krier

But, you know, one of my favorite billboards around here when I’m driving around is for a bail bondsman. Now, I don’t need this person. But when you look around, I can see the jail. And I am pretty sure that the windows where people are making their little first phone calls can see that billboard.

Deb Krier

So the placement is perfect. The other thing is, I think it says something along the lines of, do you need bail? I mean, you know, not, sorry that these things have happened to you. No, do you need bail?

Deb Krier

Because that person sitting there on the phone goes, yepers. So yeah, think about that. What is that? What are the keywords? And where do you need to see them?

Josh Ramsey

I would say the same thing, you know, I held up this coin for a reason. So when we talk about unique selling position, sometimes just creating a unique selling position is important, right?

Josh Ramsey

But in using it the right way. Right. I’m going to give you a quick example here. I know we’re going to start wrapping this all up. But this was a gentleman that came to me in California and he’s an architect.

Josh Ramsey

This is his business card. So this is what they hand out to people. I love it.

Deb Krier

Challenge coin type of thing.

Josh Ramsey

It is, it’s a solid, thick coin, okay? It’s got beautiful marks on it, good information, his logos on it, I mean, it’s really solid. I met with him, spoke with him a little bit, and I said, this is really cool, and he was super proud of it, and I said, you should be.

Josh Ramsey

I like it, it is unique, right? I said, but let’s do something, and we sat down, and long story short, after sitting there for about five to 10 minutes, I went online and did a keyword search for him, not his name, but anything about his industry and related to a coin.

Josh Ramsey

And nothing showed up, and I even had other people sitting around us shine in, we’ll type this word in, type that word in, nothing. Then when I did his name, and I looked at what little bit of profile he had online, nothing was there, if people don’t pick us up.

Deb Krier

Cute, but…

Josh Ramsey

If people don’t pick up on the point of that, let me make it explicitly clear. You have a great idea of using this coin, but no one can find you online. Your unique selling position was the coin to keep that engagement.

Josh Ramsey

I want to work with that architect. That was a coin. What is, how do I find them? What do you do? You go to Google architect that has a coin, coin, whatever. You don’t have to name your company architect, but you’ve got to do something.

Josh Ramsey

You know, I always joke with people when I do my conferences. My dad is Dave Ramsey. My name is Joshua Ramsey. My dad is Dave Ramsey. We’ll know who Dave Ramsey is. Right. A lot of people start to marinate on that.

Josh Ramsey

They’re like, wait, Dave Ramsey. And I go, yeah, he’s Dave Ramsey. He is the original. And they’re like, really? The guy that does all the financial. Oh, well he’s good at finances, but he’s not that guy that wrote the story.

Josh Ramsey

He’s not that guy. But he’s older than that guy. So now all of a sudden, if I start to draw people in on that, if you Google Josh Ramsey or Ramsey marketing, you’re going to see my face. You’re going to see who I am.

Josh Ramsey

You’re going to be able to find “fractional CMO” and a lot of the major cities that I focus on like Dallas. I own page one of Google. I consider having three or more spots. I think I have.

Deb Krier

Right. And this is not paid, folks. Not paid.

Josh Ramsey

Not paid. That’s organic SEO. You type in Austin, Houston, Tampa, Miami, Dallas, Denver, Boise. Those are just off the top of my head seven that I’m in the top five, if not position one, fractional CMO, and then that city name.

Josh Ramsey

So there’s a whole strategy behind SEO that I can literally break down for people and say, here are the specific ways to do it, you know, and do Q&As, which by the way, Deb, I don’t know if we want to transition to this.

Josh Ramsey

That’s one of the things that I do for free.

Deb Krier

Right. That actually is a good point to transition to because we’ve only got five minutes left. So tell us, you know, how do people find you and what are the services that you provide?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, so my website is jrcmo stands for Josh Ramsey, chief marketing officer. And the main service that I provide is to help business owners grasp a better idea of how to grow their business and create a plan.

Josh Ramsey

And I do that for absolutely $0. The reason is because I believe that if I give people a good user experience, they’re going to come back and work with me. They’re going to understand the value of what I bring.

Josh Ramsey

And my marketing piece, my marketing dollars are invested in my time working with business owners to help give them a vision and a principle. Now, I don’t write out a marketing plan for it. That does cost money.

Josh Ramsey

But verbally, I give them the information that they need. So they can start writing that plan, they can then go to their marketing director and build out more of that plan, go to their best friend that does marketing and build out more of that plan.

Josh Ramsey

But I give them that different perspective, because I found in my career, that the more free information that I give, and the more I help people, pays itself back, right? That’s my approach. So I do that for free on my website, you can Google JRCMO or fractional CMO Dallas, by me, my profile has been sitting on me.

Josh Ramsey

And then on the page, there’s a free consultation. We get all I see the button. And on that little button, click that button. And it asks you to fill out a business evaluation. Typically takes someone about 10 minutes or less.

Deb Krier

So you’ve got information before you start working with them and it’s making them think about it.

Josh Ramsey

I do my research and then we sit down and we spend about 30 to 45 minutes walking through where they’re at, where they want to get to and what are those steps and get them there.

Deb Krier

Right. I love it. I love it. And again, it’s j r c m o .com. Easy peasy, right? Because there’s branding stuff that we know, too. And, you know, it’s, you know, back to what we were saying, folks, this is not rocket science, we don’t need to make it rocket science.

Deb Krier

You know, put your head into the head of who you’re trying to reach. And what is it? You know, how are you going to reach them? That, you know, I keep coming back to the Super Bowl commercials.

Deb Krier

There were so many others, I don’t think they even know who their target audience is. They were just trying to be so cute, so that people would go, Oh, this is the best ad. And I was like, I don’t know, you know, what, what it was.

Deb Krier

And, and, you know, and, and yeah, it was like, okay. And I mean, it was really funny, because there were multiple places where I would go, they spent $7 million to do that. Why? You know, and, and, you know, just think what they could have done with that $7 million that actually would bring them customers, or at least start that process.

Deb Krier

You know, as opposed to, Hey, we had an award winning Super Bowl commercial. So, but, but yeah, you know, oh my gosh, you know, Joshua, this has been so much fun. And we do have to have you on again, because, you know, I think it’s, you know, you’ve got such great information and you don’t have to write another book before you have, we have you on.

Deb Krier

But, you know, it’s, it really has been something that is, is so beneficial to folks, you know, and, and, you know, before we have you on again, do you have any final thoughts that you want to leave everyone with?

Josh Ramsey

You know, I think it just kind of recaps lately in my mind, to have a plan. I know we spoke about it. I don’t want to necessarily beat the proverbial horse, but it still blows me away that I’m talking with business owners and they’re going out.

Josh Ramsey

And I think my biggest message right now is to have a plan. Don’t just go to an ad agency and expect them to give you the plan. Have your plan first, build the plan around what you need and want, and then strategically figure it out.

Josh Ramsey

And one last little example is when you go to an SEO agency, realize that there’s two core ways to do SEO on page, which is in your website, the content that’s there and off page, which is link building, but consider, do you need link building?

Josh Ramsey

Sure. You could argue yes, but do you need on page? You need that first, right? You need to know the foundation of your marketing, who you are, your unique selling position, what makes you new, what makes you proud, right?

Josh Ramsey

What’s your blood, sweat and tears? And that needs to be poured out strategically and well explained on your website. That’s called on-page SEO. So be careful when you create these plans and you hire people, you’re spending money that could be not well invested.

Josh Ramsey

Cause if you drive people to your website, well, Deb, you just said it. I’m just saying it in a different way. You, you spend $7 million and you drive people to your website, but 98% of them bounce, what good did that 7 million do, right?

Josh Ramsey

And, and, you know, that just kind of to me sums up and recaps a lot of what you and I spoke about. So I love being here, Deb. I think it was great. It’s great fun

Deb Krier

Great fun. I love it. I love it. And we will do it again. Because I think a lot of these are things, you know, we say that they’re basic. But so many companies, and I shouldn’t say companies, so many business owners, marketing folks, whoever they are, don’t know anything about it.

Deb Krier

You know, and they or they think it doesn’t pertain to me. And, you know, that’s, that’s the thing. They’re like, you know, we’re the small plumber. What does this matter? That’s where it really matters.

Deb Krier

You know, you’ve got to get the attention away and make sure that you’re the small plumber that pops up when somebody says, Oh my God, I live in X place and my sink is backed up. Well, Joshua, this has been fantastic.

Deb Krier

We will have you on again. But until then, I’m Deb Crear. I’ve been having such a fun conversation about marketing with Joshua Ramsey. And until next time, everyone have a great day.

Deb Krier

Tune in for our next program for even more trends, best practices, and techniques for how to make your business a success. The Business Power Hour, hosted by Deb Krier, is proud to be part of the C -suite network.

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