Spill The Tea | Episode 7 | Digital Roadmap
[Ming Johanson]
I’ve done sales for well over 20 years, and I was one of those when I started in sales, I was one of those really annoying fundraisers that stand on a street corner and ask you to donate to a charity for the rest of your natural born life.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, you’re so much better than me. I lasted 46 hours in that job.
[Ming Johanson]
I was in that job for 5 years.
[Kira Carlin]
I couldn’t even make it through a complete week.
[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]
Hey Ming
[Ming Johanson]
Hi Kira
[Kira Carlin]
So what tea have we got here?
[Ming Johanson]
We have black rose tea, which I’m going to shove it in your face so that you can smell it and that people can just experience the smell as we listen and smell-a-vision becomes a thing.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, I would love the smell-a-vision to become a thing. [Yes] There are so many cooking shows I would watch.
[Ming Johanson]
Smell, I’d just smell them.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, that’s it.
[Ming Johanson]
But then I’d be hungry all the time.
[Kira Carlin]
I have no interest in looking at food that I can’t smell.
[Ming Johanson]
So this is black rose from T2, not sponsored by T2 but I’m just saying T2 If you want to give us free tea or money. I won’t be mad about it. [laugh]
[Kira Carlin]
I actually buy way too much stuff from them.
[Ming Johanson]
I currently have a shopping list of teapots for my birthday.
[Kira Carlin]
Ohhh… Teapots.
[Ming Johanson]
And they match my hair.
[Kira Carlin]
Of course they do. They have to.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, with gold trimming.
[Kira Carlin]
Can we gold leaf your hair?
[Ming Johanson]
I’d like to.
[Kira Carlin]
Just like gold leaf tip.
[Ming Johanson]
I feel like we could possibly do that with a new client we’ve just secured. He sells pigments. I feel like I could pigment my hair gold.
[Kira Carlin]
I love the pigment man. And I love that. After we came away from his workshop, everything in our lives is covered in tiny fragments of pigment.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Everything just slightly sparkles.
[Kira Carlin]
And it’s still like he just takes glitter everywhere he goes. [Yeah] He can’t help it.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, we’ve made the mistake already, where we’ve spent all of our profit on his products.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh, no.
[Kira Carlin]
That is exactly what happened.
[Ming Johanson]
Anyway, tonight we are talking about the digital road map.
[Kira Carlin]
Fabulous. I love that.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, because we were kind of touching on it in the last episode, and I thought it would be worth us talking about how it all connects.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly, because it’s something that we pitched to almost every client and every one of them looks at us like, Ugh.
[Ming Johanson]
But this is so much work. Marketing is so much work.
[Kira Carlin]
And they are not wrong, but it’s more work anyway. And if you know where you’re going, it makes your life a lot easier.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s more work if you don’t do any of it.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, it actually is.
[Ming Johanson]
If you don’t. Yeah. If you don’t, if you’re not consistent in your message, if you’re not consistently putting some sort of message out there, somehow it’s a lot more work later on to repair that.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s something we see from clients a lot as well is that they’ve been trying to put their business in a phrase or in a policy document or whatever it ends up being. And that is, that is challenging. But then they’re not quite sure what to do with it once they have that.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So again, like we were talking about websites and that being the heartbeat of your marketing in the previous episode. But I also kind of want to counter for small businesses that you don’t always necessarily have to start or even have a website, which I know sounds very counterintuitive and not very supportive of our business and what we do, but we have had clients who have a very successful, profitable business just off the back of a social media channel.
[Kira Carlin]
So I’ve got a couple of really good examples for either way of this, right? So we’re working with a client at the moment who has been working her business for some time in the cleaning field. And she is at a point where she needs to tender for more work from larger organisations. So that’s what prompted her to get a website. [Yeah] Because she knew that to really compete in that field you needed it.
[Ming Johanson]
You need receipts.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. Meanwhile, I was talking to, not so much a client, more a professional friend, a friend who I know through a work thing. She runs a food business as a side hustle with some friends. [Yeah] And they have just decided that they don’t need a website. Yeah, they wanted to check in with me to see if it was going to be a disaster.
They want to expand in the coming years, but at the moment they don’t have the capacity. They don’t have the kitchen space to do what they would need to do to expand, so they decided that instead of dealing with their cumbersome, clunky website, they were just going to get rid of it and run off social media, which is what makes them money.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, focus on what makes you money, absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, and when they, when they get to a point where they have more space to do what they want, then they’ll focus on, you know, a website that covers all the different facets of the business.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So we have a training client from years ago who’s, who makes, makes cupcakes. They’re pretty epic. She’s given me a birthday cake for the last three years. That has been incredible. I think the last one was Glow in the dark.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, my God. I am so concerned and so on to that, at the same time.
[Ming Johanson]
It was very tasty. Now I have the diabetes, so that becomes problematic. [Laugh]
[Kira Carlin]
Not because of the cake.
[Ming Johanson]
Not because of the cake. Well, maybe because of the cake. I might have eaten a lot of the cake. But her business solely runs on Facebook. And, you know, one of the things that we had the discussion around was, does she really need another place to manage?
[Kira Carlin]
Not really. [Not really] If it’s working for her then why?
[Ming Johanson]
She manages, and like, I think the key point of this is she has a very good sales process. [Mhm] So if you can manage your sales process, which is when you get an enquiry on whatever platform you’ve got going on, and you can go from the initial conversation to close, to … and in this specific case a close is a yes or a no and then transact and give them a way to give you money… then don’t overcomplicate that. You do not need to over engineer a solution around that.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely.
[Ming Johanson]
And it’s the same thing with websites and marketing and all of the things that we do when we push buttons is that it doesn’t need to be over engineered.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s the thing that got us talking about this was that we encourage clients not to overcommit themselves to too many different channels. So if you’re already finding that you’re getting great traction on Facebook and LinkedIn or TikTok and Instagram, why would you need to have all of the channels?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And if you are a new business, you might want to try a new channel because it hasn’t been tapped by this necessarily by your competitors.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. But, you know, if you’re doing one thing well, it’s better than doing six things badly. Yeah, absolutely. One can do unless you have a dedicated social media person. No one can do six channels.
[Ming Johanson]
Well even that dedicated social media person can’t do all channels. And in fact that community building takes more than one person.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
You know we’re a team of seven, and we’re, you know, we’re a sprightly crew and we’re very efficient but we’re also using these tools every day. [Mm hmm] So as a business owner, you’re not. So let’s have a talk about that in terms of where do you start? Well, okay, let’s talk about your brand language. What are you trying to achieve? What are you selling?
[Kira Carlin]
Who are You?
[Ming Johanson]
Are you clear about what you’re selling? Is it like, this comes to Start-Up questions a lot, like, is it something that people need? Is it solving a problem that they genuinely have? And it might be the problem is I don’t have enough pretty things in my life.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly, I had a medical thing yesterday, so after I finished that, I went and bought the adult equivalent of getting an ice cream after a medical [a lollipop?]. No, I went out and bought myself a pretty notebook because I needed it. And then I may have also got an ice cream, but I know my problem was I had had to do a bit of scary adulting. [Yeah] After that, the solution was…
[Ming Johanson]
Not to weep, not to be an adult.
[Kira Carlin]
Get a pretty thing like a magpie, you know? That was a solution to a problem. Great. Pain point solved.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, and you might have like… lots of people talk about a niche market being a niche business, sell a niche product, something… is just so… sell stuff you love and something that you’re passionate about. Something that you’re good at. The sales process… so I did sales. I’ve done sales for well over 20 years and I was one of those when I started in sales, I was one of those really annoying fundraisers that stand on a street corner and ask you to donate to a charity for the rest of your natural born life.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, you’re so much better than me. I lasted 46 hours in that job.
[Ming Johanson]
I was in that job for five years.
[Kira Carlin]
I couldn’t even make it through a complete week, I sucked at it.
[Ming Johanson]
So it was commission only. And like, you know, I believed in the product because in my mind it was like, well, I’m only getting paid once and the charity gets paid indefinitely till the end of all time. I’m like… one of my best friends – I’m still saved in her phone contact as Ming Red Cross. And this is like well over 20 years now. [laugh]
So, you know, I was a professional fundraiser and the thing that I was selling was hope and essentially a good feeling. [Mm hmm.] And ultimately, if people didn’t feel good or, you know, if they weren’t motivated by whatever charity I was peddling at the time, they weren’t ever going to donate. You don’t try and convince people that are never going to donate.
[Ming Johanson]
Like there were people that were very specifically animal not-for-profit and people not-for-profits. They don’t typically do both.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s funny that you say that. I’m going to be thinking about that now. [Yeah] Even the people, not-for-profit that I can support, have an animal attachment. Yeah. So things like guide dogs and you know.
[Ming Johanson]
Right! So one of my favourite not-for-profit is Amnesty International because I’m a big believer in free speech and I really was passionate about that charity and for I think over five months I raised something like $78,000 for them. [Yeah] So I am peddling thin air.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah but also the ones that you care more about, you know, my favourite places to hang out online, my favourite online shops are the ones where people are clearly nerdy about the same nerdy things that I’m into. [Yeah] So if you don’t really care about unspun wool roving probably don’t sell it because the real wool roving nerds like me. [Yeah] Spotted a mile off and the ones who do really cool stuff are the ones who really care about it.
[Ming Johanson]
So, you know, a lot of the stuff that when we’re talking about sales and online sales, it is really about being passionate. Passion sells so much more than anything else.
[Kira Carlin]
Because passion also breeds innovation. And then you get the other people who are nerdy about the same topic.
[Ming Johanson]
100 Percent, 100%. Absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
Because you’re making something cool.
[Ming Johanson]
And so I look at all of the digital stuff for a business and I go, ‘What is the shop experience that I’m having?’ ‘If this was a physical store, how would I walk into this store and what would that look like and what would that experience be?’
[Kira Carlin]
And if you can’t answer that within your own business, then it’s definitely something that needs some work.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, and it happens all the time because people just go, ‘Oh, I need a website,’ and then they bolt on another thing, ‘oh I need this,’ and they bolt it on. ‘I need social media’ and they bolt it on, and marketing and marketers are probably the worst for it because we’re all talking about the latest and greatest thing. And then everybody panics and goes, ‘Oh shit, I need to get the latest and greatest thing.’ Does it fit in with your business strategic plan? Like I’m always going, ‘Oh, what’s your business growth plan?’
[Kira Carlin]
Okay, so how are we talking about the road map? How do we build a road map?
[Ming Johanson]
So it starts with what’s the business plan? [Mm hmm] How are you planning on, like, how much money do you want? Let’s start there. And, like, I know it’s really like, there’s two different types of answers that I get for this – hyper specific where people go, ‘well, I want this amount of money per month. If I make this amount of money per month, then I can do X, Y, Z,’ or I get the people who are like, ‘I want as much money as I can humanly can get.’
[Kira Carlin]
I’m definitely in the latter camp. I’m in the ‘all of it.’
[Ming Johanson]
But the problem with that is you can’t like that’s not a tangible goal. It’s not a tangible goal to go, okay, well, realistically, ‘how do I get all of the money in the world?’
[Kira Carlin]
I’ve seen a few James Bond movies that would answer that.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh super villain, okay cool.
[Kira Carlin]
Why do I always fall down on the side of the villain?
[Ming Johanson]
Look, if Disney was anything to go by, the villains are just misunderstood.
[Kira Carlin]
They’re so much more interesting. They have goals.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, but I don’t feel like they’re very specific. Oh, well, well, they are like, yeah, if we think of “Despicable Me,” he wants to steal the moon.
[Kira Carlin]
Hmm, I was going with “Goldfinger” because I watched that quite recently. James Bond. You know, it’s wanting to irradiate the world’s gold supply to make yours more valuable. That’s a specific goal.
[Ming Johanson]
That’s a very specific goal. But how much of your own, like he would have had to have had goals, around how much of his own gold was he going to have?
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
So how much of your gold do you want before you radiate the rest of the world if you’re planning on being a super villain.
[Kira Carlin]
Which you should be and we should make the cause. [laugh]
[Ming Johanson]
So let’s just say conservatively you want to make $10,000 a month. [Great goal.] $10,000 a month is equivalent to $120,000 a year. That’s a pretty good starting point for a business.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, great place to put it.
[Ming Johanson]
All right. So $10,000 a month is two and a half grand a week. [Mm hmm] What do you need to sell that will make you $2,500 grand a week.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
And so that might look like packaging your product differently. That might look like you having different channels where you’re making income. It might not even be a product. It could be you are the product. Your service. [Yeah] How do you offer your service or how do you scale your service? So when you start to think of all of those things you can like, it’s very easy to fall down a bunch of stairs and just go, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m selling.’
So start with especially for businesses that have been around for a couple of years now. Have a look at your invoicing. Look at what you invoiced in the last year and figure out what made you the most amount of money and do more of that.
[Kira Carlin]
Like, it sounds very simple when you say it, but it’s amazing how many people don’t do the thing that makes them money because they get caught up in this whole other side of they get distracted, right? They get into this other side of things. And usually that thing isn’t even what they came into the business to do.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s usually a lot of noise.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
Or it’s some idiot on some book somewhere or even just like a Tiktok or a video somewhere where they watched a video from Gary Vee. And Gary was like, You should be working 1,000,000 hours a week, which, you know. And his message has certainly evolved more recently where he’s not doing the hustle message and he’s now doing ‘You Should Value Your Time.’
[Kira Carlin]
But also it can be as simple as the stuff that gets into people’s heads consistently is crazy because it doesn’t even need to be an expert. It can be as simple as your Uncle Merve on Christmas, half cut by the end of the day. Just being like ‘young people don’t work hard’ and for some reason.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, It’s an earworm.
[Kira Carlin]
You may have never liistened to him before, for any reason that’s got into your head.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, it’s 100% an earworm.
[Kira Carlin]
And you’re doing something for reasons that are not about the bottom line in the business.
[Ming Johanson]
So here’s a fun story. So for many, many years I would run what’s called a digital disconnect retreat. And the purpose of this retreat was to teach people marketing, without their devices. And I would get maybe 50% of attendees asking me, how the hell are you going to teach me all the things about marketing without all my technology? I’m going to bring my laptop.
I’m going to be like, they would go into full rebellion and bring their technology despite it being called a digital disconnect retreat, which is fine. That’s part of the process. And what’s really funny is that people get caught up in technology and don’t realise that the thing that you are marketing irrespective of is if it’s a product or service you are selling yourself.
[Kira Carlin]
And in some ways marketing hasn’t changed that much, even though literally everything has changed in the last thousand years about how we market. In some ways it’s very similar to what we were doing 1000-2000 years ago.
[Ming Johanson]
So one of the things I’ve often shared, I think I’ve shared this on 6PR couple of times as well is social media is the epitome of the butcher shop in the 1940s and the butcher shop would know everybody down the street on the left, everybody down on the street on the right and everybody down on the street is ahead of them.
They would know the names of the children. They would know the wives, they know the husbands. They would know who had had what hobby they knew who was having an affair with, who they knew every single detail right down to the fact that you would come in and they would already have your order, your weekly order that you systematically order every single week. That’s exactly identical. And the same with some varying degrees of differences. But have it ready by the time you walk into the shop.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
Social media is exactly the same. What you are doing is you are collecting information over a long period of time to get to know your customer so you can sell them the thing that they want.
[Kira Carlin]
Well, and it feeds into the idea. I mean, word of mouth is still the strongest marketing and advertising out there. We just do it differently now, through social media.
[Ming Johanson]
Social media just is an amplifier for marketing that has existed for time, never ending.
[Kira Carlin]
Here’s the thing. I’ve mentioned on this podcast before that I used to be a photographer, a nightclub photographer, so the clubs would pay photographers to come in and take social photographs of people. You’ve all seen the type of thing like staring down the thing like a deer in headlights, looking pissed out of your mind.
So they would take these things and they weren’t interested in candids or anything like that. They wanted pictures that would go up on their socials and people would go online and tag themselves. Yeah, the only reason they were willing to pay for that is because it would show up in other people’s feeds and they would go, ‘Oh, my friends go there.’ [Yeah] ‘It must be great. My friends go there.’ [Yeah] So then it’s the same thing as seeing a mate walk out of a tavern at, you know, 11:15pm. It’s exactly the same thing. The people I like and trust also like and trust this place.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s not just that, It’s also second hand smoke conversation while somebody is standing in aisle four having a conversation about this mortgage broker. [Yeah] That they’ve just been dealing with this fantastic experience or terrible experience that they’ve been having and the person who is walking in aisle three or aisle five hearing this like second-hand smoke is storing that information.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. We trust what other people say. That’s where it comes down to. So those things in many, many ways haven’t changed. It’s just the matter of delivery that’s changed.
[Ming Johanson]
So let’s go back to the butcher shop. So the butcher shop would know all of these people, but that would be limited to your community. Hmm. Now, when we look at the Internet, you have an unlimited reach and an untapped opportunity to reach as many people as humanly possible. Now, not your message is not going to be relevant or important to a bunch of those people. Some of those people will be vegans, who will never walk into a butcher shop. Right.
[Kira Carlin]
And will go a step further and actively hate that you exist forever.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
But that is what it is. Not every channel gets to every person, not every… You know, some people react well to your newsletters, some people will hate them and they immediately go to spam. Some people react to socials, some people don’t even get that.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s still to this day, the best news that I am subscribed to is Seth Godin newsletter, who is a marketer who wrote a book called ‘All Market is a Liars’ or ‘Purple Cow’. Some of his newsletters are a sentence long and they’re great.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
[Ming Johanson]
So, you know, like, there is. There is a market for anybody and everybody at every price. Hmm. Now, if you want to charge, let’s say, $1,000 for a product, you best be packaging it to look like a $1,000 product.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely.
[Ming Johanson]
Tiffany.co sells a paperclip for like 400 bucks.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. And there is an entire… they are so iconic in the way that they do it that there is a colour named after them.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Yep.
Kira Carlin
Like they have, they have done an incredible job over many, many years.
[Ming Johanson]
Does that mean I’m iconic, I have a Ming Blue. [laugh]
Kira Carlin
You do. I would take that and run with it. Yeah. They’ve been so effective over so many years at this thing that they are now part of the cultural zeitgeist forever. [Yeah] They’re just a company like any other company. Their marketing is just very good.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So going back to the road map and going back to your business plan, let’s have a think about what it is that you’re building, how much money you want to earn and like it’s baby steps, right? So if $10,000 is too much, okay, let’s scale it back. What’s $4,000 look like? That’s a grand a week. [Yeah] How many products? How much of your time do you need to sell in order to make a grand a week? Because a grand a week is still $52,000 a year.
Kira Carlin
Yeah. Which is also a great number for an early point business.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So then you start to think about, okay, well if I focus in on this product or these features, whatever it is, ultimately it’s the product you’re selling, not the features. [Mm hmm] Then how are you promoting that? How are you selling that? Where did those sales come from? If you’re an existing business that’s been around for two years or more, you know where your customers came from.
Kira Carlin
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
Do more of that.
[Kira Carlin]
And have to think about talking to the people that they came from. If you’re noticing, you get a lot of business, let’s say you’re a mortgage broker from the example you were using before, if you’re noticing you’re getting a lot of business from real estate agents, maybe go talk to those real estate agents. [Yeah] Go talk to the people your business comes from.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So, yeah. And then you’re talking about the referral market and then you’re talking about how do you educate real estate agents to go out and talk on your behalf?
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. And if you’ve got systems for that, you know, we have, we were working with a client recently who does lots of not-for-profit mental health education. They have a whole section on their website for mental health and medical providers. Yeah. They have all the things that they need right there. [Yeah] Make it easy for people to refer to you.
[Ming Johanson]
Make it easy to access the information. [Yeah] I think as well like, when we’re talking about all of this, like we think about… so when we’re talking about content… So, okay, so we’ve talked about the website, we talked about your product. We talked about, like, your business plan is a really instrumental part in knowing where to focus your marketing. It’s really important. The amount of businesses that don’t have a business plan is horrifying.
[Kira Carlin]
And it’s worth knowing no matter where you live. Definitely where we are in Western Australia, but no matter where you live, there is a government funded business centre that will help you develop a business plan.
[Ming Johanson]
100%. Absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
There is one of those pretty much everywhere.
[Ming Johanson]
And it doesn’t have to be a complex business plan. You don’t need to download a template that’s 56 pages long like I did on my first day. It can be a one page business plan. [Yeah] What am I selling? How am I selling it? Who am I selling it to? Then when you’re talking about the messaging on your social media, where is my audience? Where are they spending the most amount of time? For us when we walk into a business, one of the questions that we ask is, what’s the information that you’re spending a lot of time informing your customers about that could be a blog.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. Where are they? Where are your customers spending time? Where are they hanging out? If your customers are a more professional crowd, a more suit/CBD, deal crowd. You might want to look at LinkedIn. [Yeah] Because that’s where they are.
[Ming Johanson]
Also Twitter.
[Kira Carlin]
Twitter. Um, you know certain professions will stay or get… I’m a former journo. All journos hang out on Twitter. Yeah, pretty much nobody else.
[Ming Johanson]
No, that’s not true, there’s nerds there.
[Kira Carlin]
There are nerds there. Journos spend time on twitter, that’s just.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
You need to be in that space if that’s who your market is.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So if you like. So what we were talking before about blog content and answering questions that you’re being asked a lot, and you’re spending a lot of time answering, that could just be a blog, right? And then you can share that on those platforms on LinkedIn, on Twitter, LinkedIn has its own blogging platform and you start to build your own credibility in that space.
[Kira Carlin]
And those people see those things. It’s not bad for SEO either. [Yeah] You know, you’re building a reputation as an expert because you’ve answered the questions that they’ve asked before they’ve asked them.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
Plus it saves you having the same conversation 20 times.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah But the other thing it’s that blog piece is then again coming back to the term high impact activity, that blog pace can turn into 20 different posts over the next year, which then helps with your SEO. If you’re getting traffic from your social media, that’s validated traffic that’s going to your website, engagement on your social media platforms, that’s adding credibility to your platforms.
[Kira Carlin]
And on a totally uncynical level, it’s often actually helping people. It’s answering questions that you’ve heard from people that are then relevant to others. It is helping people to find an appropriate service for a problem they are having.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, like you might think of a plumber and go, Oh, I could do that myself. And then you try to do it yourself. You go, That was terrible. Like recently I have painted a wall. I am never doing that ever again because the internet proved to me that I could do it myself. All of the home renovation innovation, stupid television shows have told me that I can do this myself. I tried to do this myself.
[Kira Carlin]
You know, I’m going to spend the weekend painting my house, right?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. But you’re better at it than me. [Laugh] I’m just going to make somebody else do it. Like I will immediately outsource that to somebody else.
[Kira Carlin]
Meanwhile, plumbing. You should really outsource to somebody else. A lot of plumbing is actually illegal to do yourself.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes and electrician work. Right. So those are established industries, right? Yeah. So you could write a whole bunch of blogs about how to check your electrics. So how to check your water, how do you know when you should be swapping things or when you should book a free visit, free check up?
[Kira Carlin]
Well, for example, I am going home today to Google how to rip up carpet because the way that I’ve been ripping up carpet is not that effective. And I’m sure there’s a better way to do it. Yeah. So whoever has written that piece that I’m reading, that’s a golden opportunity because I’m very likely to get pissed off with it half way through the job and just be like.
[Ming Johanson]
What do you mean very likely? You are already pissed about this.
[Kira Carlin]
I already hate this. I’m very likely to just be like, Screw it, I’m just getting a professional. [Yeah] So of course I’m going to go back to the people who wrote the thing in the first place. Yes.
[Ming Johanson]
How are you being helpful? [Yeah] How are you adding credibility to your own business? You don’t have to tell me everything. But I mean, like, I’m not going to I am not going to start a painting business tomorrow. I’m not.
[Kira Carlin]
Also you don’t have to worry about, you know, giving away your trade secrets because no one is going to learn how to be a painter based off a 600 word article they found on Google.
[Ming Johanson]
No, even on YouTube. [Yeah, Nah.] Look, I have been sharing marketing information for the better part of 12 years. There is enough room for everyone. There is enough work out there for everyone.
[Kira Carlin]
And often what we see from people, from clients, from people who’ve taken workshops that you’ve done is that the more you share and the more you tell them about what they do, what you do, the more they’re like Oh no.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh, no.
[Kira Carlin]
I don’t want to do any of this.
[Ming Johanson]
Not today Satan.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
The more they realise how much work is actually involved as opposed to… So I get very frustrated when there is a whole ‘download my 465 tips on how to do your marketing effectively’ or ‘download this now three easy ways to do’ blah blah. And that’s like, this is not easy stuff. I mean, it’s not it’s not as complicated as it’s made out to be either. It’s really just about time, money and resources.
[Kira Carlin]
But it’s also like any other profession, it’s a learning curve that takes time [Yeah] to do well, but I would make the DIY example where I’m not sure that I would have started any of the jobs that I have successfully done in my house if I had realised how hard they were going to be. But by the time I realised that, I was already too far through to stop. [Yeah] So it’s a bit like that in digital marketing, it’s almost a blessing to me.
[Ming Johanson]
I’m watching you do that and going, not for me, no thank you.
[Kira Carlin]
I think the carpet might break me. But that’s the thing is as long as you don’t know how hard it is, you’ve got this impression that it might be okay to do it yourself.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah super easy. Barely an inconvenience. [Yeah] If you all saw Kiras face right now.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh my God. Such inconvenience.
[Ming Johanson]
So I think yeah when we’re talking about digital roadmap every business is different. Every business is different. There is no two businesses that are alike because no two businesses have the same market. Everybody has a different unique market. Even if you’re in the exact same industry, like I know there are people who will take one look at me and go, Oh, no, bag of cats. And they’ll go with somebody and that’s fine. But then there are people who will look at me and go, ‘Oh, she’s a bit cool.’ [Yeah] She kind of stands out. I want my marketing person to stand out.
[Kira Carlin]
And that’s the reason that we do that. Right? And it’s a little bit less obvious with me than it is with you, which is why I try to bring up my literal bag of cats very early in conversation.
[Ming Johanson]
The six cats?
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, because I don’t have blue hair.
[Ming Johanson]
And spinning wheels.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. I don’t have blue hair. And I need to make it clear early on that I’m the kind of person with six cats and a spinning wheel.
[Ming Johanson]
That’s an important piece of your personality.
[Kira Carlin]
It is. But also it’s a very quick weeding out system of who is going to want to actually work with me versus who wants to work with the version of me that they think is real?
[Ming Johanson]
Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
And they will come to really hate it down the line.
[Ming Johanson]
100% like you and I have both sat in a meeting with somebody who has turned around to us and said, I want you to say to me what you think I want to hear.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, that was a hard one.
[Ming Johanson]
I was like, No, no. I’m going to say to you what you need to hear. [Yeah] I’m not going to.
[Kira Carlin]
Lie about.
[Ming Johanson]
I’m not going to conflate your ego, you can F*** right off.
[Kira Carlin]
But also like it’s not going to help either of us to do that. [No] So let’s just stop wasting time. [Yeah] You know, I found that in…
[Ming Johanson]
We Care About Results. We don’t care about ego.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. So for us, leaning into our weirdness helps to qualify clients [It really does]. For other people, leaning into other things. Leaning into their expertise. [Yeah] Or into their life story or into or like I have a friend who’s a beauty therapist, and she has a very compelling story about the reason she started her business. [Yeah] She tells it straight up every time. The first thing anybody knows about her. And so people either go to her for that reason or avoid her for that reason.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And either way, she gets great clients. Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
So this is it, how do you pre-qualify your clients and a lot of that design of your digital roadmap, the placements in which you go on your social media, the language you use, all of those things contribute to that being a successful transaction.
[Kira Carlin]
Which brings me to another really important part of a digital roadmap is a style guide.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
It doesn’t have to be something, it doesn’t have to be huge document.
[Ming Johanson]
It could be a page.
[Kira Carlin]
It can be a page, but it should include your brand colours, how that branding is used. So the fonts, [the fonts] all of that kind of thing, the kind of language that’s used in your brands. Because if you are…
[Ming Johanson]
The language you don’t use in the brand, that’s so useful, especially to people like us.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. Just the way that you want your stuff to be presented. So if you are a very nurturing, caring company, you’re probably going to not use a lot of the same language that someone who runs.
[Ming Johanson]
You’re not going to use judgement language.
[Kira Carlin]
But also you’re probably not going to be talking like someone who runs a mud shop four-wheel drives. It’s just not the same vibe.
[Ming Johanson]
I was going through it today actually for our brand because we’ve gone through a rebrand and one of the things that we just do not say is the word ‘why?’ Why haven’t you? Why aren’t you? Because we know why, people don’t have time, money or resources, that’s why. [Yeah] It’s a stupid question and I’d rather have the next question of how much do you want to make?
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, what’s going to make you different?
[Ming Johanson]
What’s the result? We want to talk about the results that you’re after. [Yeah] What’s the result that you’re not getting? [Yeah] And how do we help you fix that?
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. So a brand guide is a helpful thing because the other thing you can do with that is hand it off to other people who you bring in to provide things.
[Ming Johanson]
It just informs everyone.
[Kira Carlin]
It does. It keeps everybody on the same page.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And it makes your life a lot simpler because I’ve had so many conversations with so many people that go like, well, we’re kind of, ahhhh suppose we do this…. brand guide. If you hand me a brand guide, I know what I’m doing.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. Gives us really good guardrails, I think. Like there’s plenty of people that we have conversations with who are like, Oh, you’re like the third or fourth marketing agency that we’ve come to. We’re just really unhappy about everything that’s been produced by all of the other marketing agencies that we’ve done and was like, Well, what’s, where’s your brand guide? What is that? What’s the language that’s being used? Tell me more about your business. And they are like ‘oh, they didn’t ask us that’. It’s like why? That’s the only time I ask the question, why? Why didn’t they ask that?
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, So developing those things is a really useful part of your strategy because it saves you a lot of time down the road and it feels like a load of nonsense while you’re doing it, but you’ll be surprised how much you use it.
[Ming Johanson]
Now I am going to say, it doesn’t have to be the first thing you do.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh no, Christ no.
[Ming Johanson]
Because sometimes a brand guide can come like two or three years down the track in your business. What I will say is something that’s very valuable straight off the bat, very early in your business, is knowing your true brand values, because that can become a very quick and easy framework for your content. So if you know and like a lot of people sit there going, ‘I don’t know what my values are?’ They would go ‘it’s integrity’ and like integrity is probably one of the worst values that I loath with every fibre of my being, because it’s like if that’s a value that you are aspiring for, why have you got no integrity. Why do you have to say integrity?
[Kira Carlin]
Because if you have to say it, then it’s an issue.
[Ming Johanson]
It feels problematic to me. And maybe that’s my own unconscious bias around that. But yeah, genuinely, I think there are a lot more, better ways that you can talk about integrity like that. That to me is a bare minimum. Bare minimum. You should have integrity, right? So if you’re thinking about your values, one of the processes and actually we’ll probably share this ah….
[Kira Carlin]
Feel like this deserves a podcast on its own.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah it’s probably going to, yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
I feel like this deserves its own thing because we could talk about it and have talked about this at length.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So stay tuned.
[Ming Johanson]
This can be or it could be a blog or maybe another podcast. I don’t know.
[Kira Carlin]
To quote that little Mexican girl from the El Paso ad [speaking Mexican]. She’s so cute.
[Ming Johanson]
She is very cute. We might wrap it up there because we have been talking for a really long time about this one.
[Kira Carlin]
We have been.
[Ming Johanson]
So if you want to find out more, you can follow us. Well, you can connect with both of us on LinkedIn. My name is Ming Johanson and I am with…
[Kira Carlin]
[Ming Johanson]
And you can also check us out on markeingjumpstart.com.au.
