Spill The Tea | Episode 6 – Is My Website Enough?:
[Ming Johanson]
It folds and it’s a touch phone and it just looks like witchcraft. And I love it.
[Kira Carlin]
Every single person, every single client meeting we ever take. They’re always like, ‘What’s that?’
[Ming Johanson]
‘What is that? It’s so cool!’ Like because it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t logically make any sense. The only answer is witchcraft. And I love that.
[Intro]
What if you could learn from the mistakes of others? The Spill The Tea podcast is a great way to get information on all things related with digital marketing and business. Hosts myself, Ming Johanson and Kira Carlin break down our knowledge in various fields, including business, sales and marketing. So whether you’re new or old at doing any of these things, tune in each week and hear the lessons learnt, titbits of knowledge and talk of tea.
[Kira Carlin]
Hi Ming
[Ming Johanson]
Hi Kira
[Kira Carlin]
Are we recording yet?
[Ming Johanson]
We are
[Kira Carlin]
Oh good I love it when that happens. [Dog Yawn] Aww, Big yawn. My dog ‘Juno’ is in the studio with us today.
[Ming Johanson]
Keeping us company.
[Kira Carlin]
And she just woke up and there was a very big yawn.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. What tree? What tree? What tree are we drinking? What tea are we drinking?
[Kira Carlin]
You were still thinking about dog treats, weren’t you?
[Ming Johanson]
I was.
[Kira Carlin]
So we are drinking a T2 Tea? It’s Chiang Mai Chai. And it’s like a regular chai. But with, like, lemongrass.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s very tasty.
[Kira Carlin]
It is good, isn’t it? I like it.
[Ming Johanson]
Smells nice. I love a good tea that smells nice.
[Kira Carlin]
I wouldn’t have automatically put lemongrass in chai, but it’s really nice.
[Ming Johanson]
I really. So I really like lemongrass in a curry that my mom makes, that for, whatever reason, I don’t really know why she calls it this, but she called it Hungarian goulash for a very long time. It’s not. It’s a curry.
[Kira Carlin]
I mean, I’ve never had goulash with lemongrass, but I’m totally willing to try it.
[Ming Johanson]
I feel like she was just trying to trick people into eating it.
[Kira Carlin]
Why would you need to be tricked into eating? That sounds awesome.
[Ming Johanson]
I know. I don’t know. I don’t know what fight she was trying to fight that day, but is it’s very delicious. And it is one of my favourite meals that my mom cooks for me. And yeah, I still call it Hungarian goulash because the marketing stuck.
[Kira Carlin]
That is amazing! It’s hysterical what we hang on to, especially from childhood. Like I used to have this. So my best friend growing up, her house, she’d have this sort of semolina pudding that I used to quite like until they started calling it Frog’s Eyes, because that’s what it looked like. And I can never eat semolina ever again in my life. Can’t do it, I won’t do it.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh I see one of my favourite shots in my twenties because obviously I don’t drink now because everything hurts. But one of my favourite shots was ‘squashed frogs’.
[Kira Carlin]
I do like a squashed frog, I do enjoy a squashed frog. [It’s delicious] Actually someone once gave me a bottle of vodka in which they had um… disintegrated a whole bag of red frogs.
[Ming Johanson]
I couldn’t do it now.
[Kira Carlin]
I Can’t do it now.
[Ming Johanson]
Everything hurts.
[Kira Carlin]
At 19, it was the bomb.
[Ming Johanson]
What are we talking about today?
[Kira Carlin]
We are talking about websites. And this is the thing I get asked a lot. So it’s and I mean, it all boils down to this one question, but it sounds like a lot of different things. Like, ‘I really think I need to learn more about SEO’ or like ‘what’s the best payment gateway’ or what is.
[Ming Johanson]
‘What’s the best calendar tool?’
[Kira Carlin]
‘What’s the best calendar tool?’ ’What’s the best…?’ ‘What do you think I need to do about my graphic design?’ And all of it really boils down to this one central thing, because they don’t actually care about SEO or graphic design or any of those things. They think that’s what they care about because they’ve Googled a bit and…
[Ming Johanson]
Somebody somewhere is yelling it on the Internet.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. They think that’s what they care about. But what they’re actually saying is, is my website enough?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Is it enough to do what I need to do?
[Ming Johanson]
♪♪♪ It’s never, never, never. ♪♪♪
[Kira Carlin]
It really feels like there’s that whole thing out there. Like, no matter what you do on the web, it’s never going to be enough. Never, ever, ever.
[Ming Johanson]
Well, it’s always worth pointing out, it’s always a work in progress.
[Kira Carlin]
Well, exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
Because your brand is always a work in progress and your business is always a work in progress.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. But the messaging is always no matter what you’re doing, you need to be doing it better and faster and cheaper and it doesn’t feel great.
[Ming Johanson]
Which is very frustrating for me.
[Kira Carlin]
Of course and it’s like every other, ‘never enough’ bit of advertising. It’s nonsense.
[Ming Johanson]
We have never. Typically, guilt marketing is not the way that we have marketed our own business because I don’t believe in it and I don’t believe anybody should feel bad about wherever they’re at. Because wherever you’re at, so long as it’s making you money…
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. And I’ve seen some really good websites that are built by someone on Wix with no knowledge of whatever they’re doing, and it does the job.
[Ming Johanson]
I’ve seen some terrible trash fires that are still making money.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. It doesn’t matter, you know what I mean? As long as it’s doing the job that it’s designed for.
[Ming Johanson]
I think it’s the attachment to perfection.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, I think you’re probably right.
[Ming Johanson]
I think there’s this idea that there is such a thing as a perfect website. There isn’t. There isn’t such a thing as a perfect website. It’s constantly evolving. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think our website is a perfect website, but even then, like, there’s still tweaks and there’s still blogs and there’s still content and there’s still stuff that needs to be done [Yeah]. We’ve just gone through a major rebrand. So, you know.
[Kira Carlin]
Also the way that fashion moves in web development, you’d need to read like completely overhaul every two years just to stay current.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s every six months.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, it really is. I was thinking about that.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, technology transformation, UX design transformation, device change. So the fact that we’ve evolved into creatures that stare at mobile phones, even just the mobile phone designs have changed. Where, like the first three months… so I got a Samsung Galaxy fold, mainly because it’s magical, it folds and it’s a touch phone and it just looks like witchcraft and I love it.
[Kira Carlin]
Every single person, every single client meeting we ever take, they’re always like, ‘What’s that?’
[Ming Johanson]
‘What is that? It’s so cool.’ Because it just doesn’t it doesn’t logically make any sense. It’s like the only answer is witchcraft. And I love that. So for the first three months of owning this thing, most websites that I have had to load on it do not work because they’re not designed for a tablet phone, they’re designed for a phone.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. And then as things gradually catch up, it all changes and then the tech changes again.
[Ming Johanson]
So it’s worth noting, it’s mostly caught up in the last three months.
[Kira Carlin]
So because of the space that I occupy within the business, I hear a lot of particularly very small business owners who are terrified that they aren’t a real business. So their website looks perfect and has been designed by a professional and has been done over in every sense of the word. It’s not true. Like there’s one particular person I’m thinking of who works in the wellness space and her website is fabulous for the job that it does.
[Yeah] It’s not what I would have done with it. It’s not the job that I would have done had she brought it to me and said, ‘Make me a website.’ [Yeah] but for her purposes, it looks real nice. Yeah, it lays out everything it needs to and all the calendars work and everything’s just easy [Functional]. She gets bookings through it [great], perfect [okay], job done.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, Calm down.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] But so I have always spoken about it like it’s a 10% tweak. It’s, it’s more often than not less than that. But most websites, most social media, most marketing of some sort could use 10% tweak. [Yeah]. And if that 10% tweak makes you $1000 to $10000 more money, you make the tweak, right?
[Kira Carlin]
Like it’s a very few things in web that are an emergency. So obviously we deal with actual emergencies where there are data breaches and things like that and that is an emergency
[Ming Johanson]
Website Hacks!
[Kira Carlin]
There is, your payment gateway is broken, your calendar is broken. Those are emergencies.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep.
[Kira Carlin]
The fact that it looks a little bit dated is not an emergency. [No]. If it’s still doing the job, great. And we did a whole thing about UX. So if you’re interested in that side of things and how a good website is created and built, go back to episode 2 and Check that out because we go into way more detail about it. But ultimately, as long as it works, it’s good enough.
[Ming Johanson]
Does it get people to your digital doorway where they can transact easily.
[Kira Carlin]
And do they do it once they get there?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
The end of discussion.
[Ming Johanson]
And also like it’s worth pointing out this litany of reasons as to why they haven’t transacted. And it’s not necessarily anything to do with your website. [No], It’s almost always they got a text message from them or they got a missed phone call or they’ve been distracted by an app notification or they haven’t turned off the email notifications on the computer and they’re getting distracted every 5 minutes.
[Kira Carlin]
Or like me, if you’re a shopper, an Internet shopper, like me you stalk the product that you want before you buy it. [Yeah], I’ll just leave that tab open for a while to see if I really want it. And I’ll go and nearly buy it. And then I’ll be like, Nah, I don’t really want it. And then I’ll go nearly buy it.
[Ming Johanson]
And then you get an email a day later giving you a discount.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. But I like to stalk my products. [Yeah same] and a lot of people do it that way. Not a lot of people go, I need this thing. I will find a place to buy it. Now I’m buying it. [Yeah]. Some of us shop that way for some products, we may shop that way, but particularly for nice to haves and luxury products, I don’t do that. I’ve had a lamp sitting in an open tab that I’ve wanted for ages. I probably had that sitting there for two months and I will buy it eventually. But it’s just not a financial priority right now.
[Ming Johanson]
So I do that to manage my impulse. So I will leave things in a cart, deliberately walk away, come back to it in a couple of days to see if I still really want it.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
Because the impulse on a lot of websites to purchase there and then is often like crippling pressure.
[Kira Carlin]
Especially if they’ve got a countdown clock or anything.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
We know because we make these.
[Ming Johanson]
We make them, we build them.
[Kira Carlin]
It just counts down to nothing and starts again. Like it’s not an actual countdown.
[Ming Johanson]
We try to be ethical, but at the end of the day we’re still marketers.
[Kira Carlin]
Ultimately if somebody wants a countdown clock, we’re giving them a countdown clock.
[Ming Johanson]
Because it works. It works. But yeah, like.
[Kira Carlin]
I know it’s not real and it works on me.
[Ming Johanson]
[laugh] That’s the worst bit, we’re both consciously, very consciously aware of how all of the marketing machines work, and we still do it.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. And, you know, it can be something as simple as the thing that puts your person off for that moment can be something as simple as you don’t do Afterpay. And they’re a bit tight this week and they want to keep their options open.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So I’ll buy it in a couple of weeks when they’re feeling a little bit more flush or they went in to see if you did Afterpay.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s almost always for me. They want me to email them. I can’t actually transact. I can’t actually just give them money and buy the thing, they want me to email them and that is way too many steps for me.
[Kira Carlin]
I had a shocker the other week. I bought a dress for an upcoming wedding that I have to go to. And I have been looking for this dress for some time because it’s sold out almost everywhere and I just happened to really like it. I found one in my size and like I was saying in the last podcast, I love that I can just measure the thing and look at the size chart and it’s fine.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
The person who I bought it from… so I go through the whole process. I get a confirmation email and then I get this crazy email followed by a text message from the seller saying, ‘Hey, do you want to just send me your measurements so that I can make sure that it fits?’
[Ming Johanson]
Oh yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
I was like, ‘Oh, hell no. Yeah, I don’t know you.’ Am I allowed to swear on this podcast?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, well, it’ll have an explicit thing but we can.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, okay because my immediate reaction was ‘F*** right off’ that is an incredibly personal question to ask somebody [Yeah] who you don’t know.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Especially when you’ve already essentially asked that question.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s a personal question to ask even if you know that person.
[Kira Carlin]
But it’s like I’ve already gone through the due diligence of checking the size. Yeah. You only had the one size available anyway. So what are we going to do at this point? You already have my money in my order. Yeah, it’s totally unnecessary.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s an extra step.
[Kira Carlin]
I will never order from them ever again. So I’ve got the dress that I wanted. They were the only place that had it. But they are now on my mental blacklist forever.
[Ming Johanson]
Wow.
[Kira Carlin]
And I suspect the reason behind that is that they resell a lot of vintage stuff.
[Ming Johanson]
Well, it’s often a knee jerk, over management of previous experiences.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. But this is what I suspect is that it’s because they are a reseller of like one off things that they found in op shops. This is not that thing, there is also a sizing chart. We’ve already covered this.
[Ming Johanson]
So I find that with business owners who are over explaining what it is they do.
[Kira Carlin]
Which is annoying by the way.
[Ming Johanson]
They do and they do it because they spend all of their time explaining to people who are not their customer what they do.
[Kira Carlin]
And I think the most egregious version of those things is in industries that we all know really well. [Yeah] We all know what a financial planner is. Calm down. [Yeah] Even if you are a particular kind of financial planner, just explain that bit. You don’t need to, like… just explain your point of difference.
[Ming Johanson]
What’s your unique offering, right?
[Kira Carlin]
But you don’t need to explain to us what financial planning is. [we know]
[Ming Johanson]
Well, I’m sure some people don’t know. But again, like, is that because they think it’s an untapped market?
[Kira Carlin]
I don’t know. But those people aren’t looking for a financial planner. [No] If you don’t know what a financial planner is…
[Ming Johanson]
You’re not looking for one.
[Kira Carlin]
The amount of people who I have met in recent years who don’t know what a mortgage broker is or does.
[Ming Johanson]
Shocking is actually shocking.
[Kira Carlin]
But these people aren’t looking for a mortgage broker.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
You don’t need to explain to them what a mortgage broker is because they already don’t know. And you don’t need to explain it to me because I already have one.
[Ming Johanson]
So one of the terms that comes up quite a lot in this space, especially when it comes to ‘is my website good’ enough is vanity metrics.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh yeah, people spend a lot of time on things that they think that they should be doing because it will make their website good enough.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So things like traffic or there’s a term that’s used in Google ads quite a lot called impressions, which is the amount of people or the amount of times that the ad has been seen. It’s actually really easy to fake impressions. Yeah, it’s not impressive. It’s not an impressive number. The number that you can measure to like really detailed minutiae is conversions.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
So if we count things like a call to a phone number, a form fill or a purchase, those things are actual conversions. They are things that are going to lead to more money.
[Kira Carlin]
And you can tell Google what you want a conversion to be in your metrics.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So those things are important. We got really caught up as a society for a long time in likes and followers.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep. Clicks, clicks are still important, but I think you can have a lot of clicks and not a lot of page loads. Page loads are more valuable.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. But also. Okay. It’s great that you have a lot of eyeballs on your thing, but if they’re not paying for the thing that you’re selling, then what’s the point?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So if you’ve got, you know, 30,000 people looking at things and nobody’s buying it, then there is a problem.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And there’s a litany of things that could be causing that as well.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely.
[Ming Johanson]
Time on site. How long are they actually on your site for?
[Kira Carlin]
And that is a moment when you know that something is not enough on your website.
[Ming Johanson]
Like a minute and a half on the Internet is like a decade.
[Kira Carlin]
It is, it’s so long but you know, at that point that you need to fix or change something because those vanity metrics aren’t turning into anything. [Yeah] But that’s not a problem with the amount of eyeballs on the screen. That’s a problem with your sales funnels or your sales process.
[Ming Johanson]
And as we’re talking about conversion percentages, like the amount of clicks to the amount of impressions to the amount of conversions and people get it in their head that they need like a 10% conversion. If you have 100,000 people going to your website and they are not qualified because you haven’t targeted properly, you’ve been too broad in your targeting and they’ve gone to your website and then, you know, you’ve had maybe 90,000 of them fall off, 10,000 have stuck around for a little bit, but then more have dropped off. A thousand people have stayed. Out of those thousand people, maybe ten might convert.
[Kira Carlin]
Hmm. But even if you’re looking at a 10% conversion rate, let’s say.
[Ming Johanson]
Ten people converting could still be a lot of money.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, but even 10%, even if it’s about 100 people, can you really serve 100 people in your business? If you can. That’s fabulous. [Yeah] If you can’t, you’re creating an automatic bad customer service experience because you’re trying to do too much.
[Ming Johanson]
So and we talk about this in terms of product development, because incidentally, we ended up doing product development for some of our clients because they sell very small products and try to sell a higher volume of it, but then they fall into a hole because they end up having to package and send lots of volumes of small things, as opposed to packaging things together and sending more for higher… Like even if it’s just increasing your sale value from $2 to $20, [yeah], that makes such a significant difference. And the volume of sales that you only have to worry about is significantly less than if you were selling a $2 product.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly the amount of postage things you have to think about, the amount of post office trips you make is going down.
[Ming Johanson]
Obviously, if we’re talking about physical products, if we’re talking about digital products, look, the same thing is, are you really selling something valuable for $2 to $20? Yeah. And like because I’ve seen people buy things for $20 and be disappointed.
[Kira Carlin]
Hmm. Absolutely. And then there’s some things that it doesn’t matter again. So I think it really depends on an emotional value, particularly with digital products. [Yeah] So I went online, onto I think it was Bandcamp the other day and bought a song.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
I haven’t done that in many years because I, like everybody else, have Spotify. [Yeah] But it was a song that was from somebody whose work I used to follow a million years ago back in uni, and I hadn’t heard it in a while and something made me think of it. I can’t even remember what I think. I was in a supermarket and something similar came on, so I went and bought it and it was one of those like, how much do you want to pay? So I probably paid ten bucks for that song because.
[Ming Johanson]
You could.
[Kira Carlin]
I could, and I liked the work and I was asked how valuable it was to me and that is how valuable it was to me.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And that’s, you know, it’s an emotional value when you’re talking about a digital thing.
[Ming Johanson]
So in my career as a marketer and being in business 12 years now, I have run workshops and one of the things that I’ve done in workshops is pay, pay what you pay, what you can afford, pay what you feel. [Yeah] And it’s always interesting for me, people will pay anywhere from $10 to $100 if you don’t give them any scope.
[Mm] And there’s lots of different reasons why they do that, because they feel like they’re going to be judged for what if the amount is because they genuinely can’t afford it, because whatever, like it’s and it’s really interesting how like I always get really frustrated with those things that talk about the psychology of pricing was like, well, the psychology of pricing is constantly changing.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, absolutely. And the way we price now is different from the way we price ten years ago in the way with a price in or out of a recession. And this is where the digital space becomes really interesting. So I had a conversation this week with a person who owns a small business and she asked me, she said to me, ‘I really want to learn more about SEO.’
And my first thing is like, ‘Why?’ [Yeah] Like you’re at a point in your business where and we’re going to talk about this in another podcast like you’ve built this thing and you’re trying to figure out how to make people come to the thing. And you’ve decided, based on a couple of hours of Googling, that SEO is what you need.
[Ming Johanson]
That’s just marketers peddling, is SEO.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
Not to say not to dismiss it and not to say that it’s not important. It’s a piece of a very big puzzle. But look, SEO definitely informs Google ads to make them cheaper.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. But it’s not going to on its own like make your business.
[Ming Johanson]
So it’s definitely a long game.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, it’s not. It was definitely not going to do the things that she wanted it to do.
[Ming Johanson]
No. And it’s probably almost never something a business owner should focus on.
[Kira Carlin]
No.
[Ming Johanson]
You shouldn’t spend your time doing it.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah especially when you’re in that very new stage. So she was a sole trader. The business is under six months old. [Oh, yeah] There’s other things that she needs to be doing. [Yeah] The Internet says that this is what she needs to know how to do. So she was doing it and props to her. You know, it’s always nice to see people learning and growing their businesses, and learning and growing their skill sets, but there were better places for her to put her time.
So the minute you say things like there’s over 200 points involved in SEO, peoples’ faces just glaze. [Yeah] Because they start to realise this is not actually the important thing that they thought it was.
[Ming Johanson]
So I think I’m constantly, so one of the questions I have asked for over a decade now is what is a ‘you’ job. [Mm] How much is your time worth? If your time and I always frame it and tell people your time is worth $280 an hour, just, just even if it’s not right now, even if you’re a small business and you’re charging $30 an hour, which you shouldn’t, you should immediately raise your prices.
But if you’re a small business owner, because like we come out of employment and we go, well, 30 bucks an hour is awesome because my pay was like $18 an hour. So that’s clearly going to be like I did that when I started my business. But your time is worth $280 an hour. The reason why your time is worth $280 now is nobody is paying you to do your own marketing.
Nobody’s paying you to do your own admin. Nobody is paying you to do your own accounting. Nobody’s paying you for any of that. And if you start valuing your time at $280, you start to make very different decisions around where you were spending your time.
[Kira Carlin]
Mhm and what is worth bringing a professional in to deal with.
[Ming Johanson]
So we’re talking about your time, your time value and how you exchange it and whether or not you should be spending all this time on all these different things on your website.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. So, yes, I totally agree that if you’re going to a professional to have a website built, your SEO is a big part of that and that shouldn’t be part of the conversation. But if you’re six months into your business, you’re a sole trader, you have better places to put your time and energy. [Yeah] And your website in that situation is definitely enough as it is. [Yeah] Probably better served to focus on your socials in that situation.
[Ming Johanson]
Content. Make content!
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
If you are new and your business, make content, video content is probably the best thing you can do. It’s what we call high impact activities because video can turn into other types of content. If anybody is familiar with my brand, you might notice that I’m up, so I’m on the television a lot. I’m on the media, and that piece of media then turns into five different posts.
One might be an article following up on what I said in the news. It might be a LinkedIn post sharing the video. It might be a screenshot of me having a silly face. There’s lots of different pieces that come out of video and even like I could pull the audio and do an audio track somewhere.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. I still think we should be leveraging the fact that every time you go on the news or do something, your mum posts something along the lines of like, ‘Oh my God, my daughter’s on the news.’ I still think we should be doing more with that.
[Ming Johanson]
She’s my biggest fan.
[Kira Carlin]
I just think we should screenshot that with ‘how cute is Ming’s mum’.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] We could do that.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely, FYI Ming’s mom is adorable.
[Ming Johanson]
She’s adorable and very, very adoptable and probably kidnappable. So when people are thinking about ‘Is my website enough’ and how those questions look like, which is, you know, ‘I think I need to be doing SEO’ or ‘I need to be doing more on Facebook’, ‘I need to be doing more on social media.’ ‘I need to be doing Google ads.’
Yes you probably do need to be doing any of those things. I think the first question is, when you’re really asking about ‘is my website enough’, is how do I get to transact?
[Kira Carlin]
How am I making money off this? It is enough. If it’s making you money, the rest of it is nice to have. [Yeah] As your business grows, they become closer to must haves.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
But honestly, they ate after the skateboard version that gets you moving, not essential newsletters. Write your newsletter. Exactly. I would have a newsletter actually before I would think about my SEO.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
Because it’s an engaged, focussed audience.
[Kira Carlin]
You already know that they like you. They bought stuff from you. [Yeah, ideally] It’s, that old adage isn’t it. You know, bird in the hand all that kind of stuff. You already know that they like you.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. They’ve already bought off you.
[Kira Carlin]
And there’s a reason why those massive companies that can spend any amount of money on it and do spend any amount of money on their Google ads are still spamming you with newsletters because it works.
[Ming Johanson]
Of course it does.
[Kira Carlin]
That’s why they do it.
[Ming Johanson]
But the purpose of the newsletter is not just self-contained within the newsletter. It’s part of again, it’s part of a bigger marketing strategy that’s driving traffic back to your website. [Mm hmm] Well, like I’ve always said, the website is the heartbeat of your business. [Yeah] It’s where you want people to end. Not necessarily start. So I think and I think that’s a lot of when people are writing content, they’re writing content for people to start their journey on the website, whereas that’s the end point, especially when you’ve got things like social media channels, Facebook groups, newsletters, videos, YouTube, whatever, you’ve got all of this different stuff it all should lead back to your website.
[Kira Carlin]
One of the ones that I think does this in a really interesting way is IKEA. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any real time on the IKEA website.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes, of course I have.
[Kira Carlin]
You know, how you get lost in those stores. You can get lost on that website real easy and you can spend days in there.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So they’ve got all of the planners and all of the things that are like little Lego that you can pull around [Augmented reality]. Exactly and they’ve got thousands of pieces of information, all their stuff on their environmental policy and all the different things and videos. And it’s huge and it reflects the experience of being in an IKEA store.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And they know that they have done that on purpose. They could have done this very much more pared back and a much simpler experience. But they’ve chosen to make it a labyrinth because that’s what works for them in this store.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, it’s the experience, right? The IKEA experience. We all know what that looks like. [Exactly] And then, you know, so and I love some of the stuff that comes out of IKEA, especially on what is it, April Fool’s Day, you know, left handed allen keys. Hilarious. So, you know, you really think about these bigger brands and how they engage with you and what is that whole process from start to finish? When do you start thinking about that brand?
[Kira Carlin]
So that brand has all of the resources in the world and they throw them at the marketing that they do. They spend literally millions on. [Yeah] They do every year. And this is what they’re choosing to do with that money. [Yep] And those things look like good SEO, good Google ads, newsletters, social media. They’re doing a big strategy of small steps in concert.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And that might feel really overwhelming for a small business owner that is starting out and the reality is, you do not need to do it all. Just focus on one thing and get it right, then move on to the next thing. And I say that often about social media platforms. You do not need to be on all of them.
[Kira Carlin]
No, it’s better if you’re not because you’ll be doing a half assed job.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, well, like we call it watered down orange juice. Right? It’s the watered down orange juice situation. Where, why would I follow you on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and the litany of other platforms that exist. Why would I follow you on all of them if they’re all the same message? [Yeah] It’s a missed opportunity.
[Kira Carlin]
Well, I mean, if you’re doing the same thing on Facebook as you’re doing on LinkedIn, you’re kind of missing the point.
[Ming Johanson]
I think we might talk about that in the next episode.
[Kira Carlin]
Let’s do that.
[Ming Johanson]
Let’s talk about the navigation of the digital marketing roadmap.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh yeah, so much fun.
[Ming Johanson]
Thanks for tuning in. If you want to catch up with us, you can connect with us on the LinkedIn. I am with Kira Carlin..
[Kira Carlin]
And Ming Johanson.
[Ming Johanson]
And we are Spill The Tea. This is the Spill The Tea podcast. You can also check us out on markingjumpstart.com.au.
