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260: Digital Marketing Strategy Simplified with Guest James Hipkin · Imperfect Marketing

• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I am your host, kendra Korman, and today I'm very excited to be joined by James Hipkin.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Since 2010, james has built his clients businesses with digital marketing.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Today he's passionate about websites and helping the rest of us understand online marketing, because digital marketing has almost replaced marketing in people's vocabulary, right?
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: His customers value his jargon-free, common-sense approach.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: He explains the ins and outs of digital marketing in ways that make sense.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: James is also the author of Journey to Success, a book on Hang on, I'm pulling it up.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: I have the book Digital Marketing for Small Business Owners right.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: That just came out earlier this year, in February.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: So really excited to have you, james.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Kendra, it's my pleasure, I'm looking forward to our conversation and I'm looking forward to hopefully sharing some value for your audience, hopefully sharing some value for your audience.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Great, so let's go ahead and just jump right in.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: So your background has been in building large campaigns for large companies.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: What do you see being the major difference between the success of those large companies find with their marketing and the small business owners you've been helping since 2010?
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: Well, it's a great question and it really gets to the heart of both of the problem and the opportunity when we're building campaigns for large brands.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: I worked on the campaign that launched the original Apple iPod, for example we spent months working through the strategy Before any conversations about execution.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Getting the strategy focused in and nailed down, truly understanding who the audience was, understanding what problems they were trying to solve, understanding how we were going to go about solving that problem, is the key thing to a successful marketing program.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: The execution, executional elements fall out of that, and what typically happens with smaller business owners is that it's the inverse of that.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: They'll spend all of their time trying to figure out how to create posts for social media or emails or whatever it might be and might give lip service to strategy, and that, I think, is the biggest challenge with marketing programs.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: It's also the biggest opportunity, because you know, I've never met a dad joke.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: I can't get it, get by.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: You know the two hikers in the woods and they run across a bear and the one hiker says to the other hiker we'd better run.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: And the second hiker says you can't outrun a bear.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: And he said I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you Right.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: And my husband says to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you Right.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: My husband says that one all the time.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: All the time.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: I think I heard it like yesterday.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Well, but it's a classic.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: And with a small business owner has the opportunity.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: He doesn't have to compete with the big big brands, he just needs to compete with other people in his sector, and it doesn't have to be the most brilliant thing in the world, it just needs to be a little bit better than everyone else.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: And where does that competitive advantage come from?
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: Understanding strategy.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: So I like how you ended that understanding strategy, because I don't know about you, but I find quite often people don't understand what strategy is.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: They view strategy as tactics because they don't know any better.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: So how do you explain to your small business clients in a way that they understand what strategy is?
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: What are they looking at?
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: Well, typically, I'll try to push the conversation a little bit higher.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: We'll have a conversation around okay, what's the primary objective of your website Objective?
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: And they'll give me a litany of things that they want the website to do.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: And we'll have a conversation about the definition of the word primary there can only be, and eventually they'll settle in on conversion.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: It's almost always wrong, it's just one of the controversial things that I will say.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: But the primary objective of most websites is not conversion, it's confirmation, because if you think about strategy is the means to the end, the objective is the end and strategy is the means.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: You need to understand who your best customer is, what they're like demographically, what their characteristics are, what is the problem that they are trying to solve, and then what is the gain that they generate from working with you.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: And the other half of that coin and the piece that's often missed altogether is what's the buyer's journey is, what is the event that triggers their interest in the category, what is the process they go through when they're doing their research or their consideration around how they're going to solve their problem?
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: What are the decisions and obstacles they need to overcome when they're prospecting, when they've got two or three different choices to pick from.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: And then what are the motivations and the questions that are involved at the decision point?
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Those things are going to be different as they move through their journey.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: So the website isn't the end of the process, it's usually partway through.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: So when they're arriving at the website, they're in a mindset of I have this problem I'm trying to solve.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: Does this business, this person understand my problem?
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: So that's why the primary objective of the website is confirmation.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: You need to confirm in the mind of the person who's arriving there that you get them.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: And I can confirm that several of my clients business to business.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: If they sell through, we'll call it pitches and stuff and conversion isn't necessarily a big piece of their business.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: It's not online sales.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Number one page most visited is the team page.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Who's on the team?
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Who are the people?
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: People they're confirming their expertise and stuff even before they make a phone call to them, right?
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: so it is a team page.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: It's the about us page yep, if it's not the team page, it's the about us.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Yes, exactly so.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Number one page will be the home page.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Number two will be team about us something along those lines, because they want to confirm that you are who you said you were, or that you get them right, that you have the experience to work with them.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: I love talking about that as confirmation.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Then I really liked how you're talking about the journey.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: I don't think enough people pay attention to the customer journey because it takes time.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: What is it that drove them to your site?
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: What is that initiative that?
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people and hopefully none of you listening think that they're the reason people bought from them, and I've heard this numerous times, which is why I can say I think this the reason they bought for me is because it was time.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: No, nope, nope.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: They're not spending 10,000 plus dollars on a service that you provide because it was time right.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: There's something that caused that and you really have to understand where they're going.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: I usually recommend people talk to their target audience, they talk to their ideal clients and find out what drove them or what they're dealing with or what those problems are, so that they can word it in a way that relates to them.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: What do you recommend for your clients when they're trying to figure all of this out, and where they are in the journey and what's driving them to the next step?
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: I do the same thing.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: I pick up the damn phone and call them.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, but there's a distinction here that I think is important and that we can explore.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: If, for most businesses, pareto's principle applies, 80% of their sales are being generated by 20% of their customers the specific percentages may be different, but the concept is valid when you're picking up the phone to call your, but the concept is valid when you're picking up the phone to call your customers.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: You want to make sure you're picking up the phone and calling your best customers, because their mindset is going to be different.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: They are likely heavy category users.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: They're more knowledgeable, they're more experienced, they're more invested in the decision-making process.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: They require a different level of conversation.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: The other 80% of folks who buy occasionally, et cetera.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: You're going to get them anyway, but where you want to focus your marketing effort is when you understand who your best customers are and you craft your marketing to resonate with their issues.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: You're much more likely to attract other people like them.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: So that distinction is really important.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: It's not just about picking up the phone and calling folks.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: It's picking up the phone and calling the right folks.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Yes, and I would add to that the right folks.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Yes, and I would add to that define best customer, because your best customer might not be your biggest dollar customer.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: It could be your most profitable.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: It could be the one you enjoy working with the most.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: It could be.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: You have to define what that is and again, that 80-20 rule still applies, no matter what you're using as the defining factor.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Right, whether it's profitability, whether it's revenue or if it's just enjoyment.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: I think that that fits usually.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: Usually.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: And the other thing is that a one-off sale, even if it's significant that only happens once in a blue moon, there's no.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, past behavior is predictive of future behavior.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: There's an old direct marketing concept called RFM.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Are you familiar with RFM?
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I haven't heard it.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: RFM is an acronym.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: It comes out of the catalog industry.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: It's Recency, frequency, monetary, and the majority of what goes on in very sophisticated targeting worlds is based on RFM theory and the idea is that the customer who bought from you most recently, who buys from you most frequently and who spends the most money with you, is the customer most likely to buy from you again.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: This is why, when you buy something from a catalog, what happens?
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: You get more catalogs because they know that the catalogs are expensive to produce and to send, but they know they've got the data that says they're more likely to recoup their investment from somebody who's just bought from them.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: So your best customer is a combination of those three things.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: Who have they bought from you recently, do they buy from you frequently and how much money do they spend with?
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: you.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: I like that a lot.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: It makes sense and I've definitely used that before, but I'd never heard the RFM.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: So thank you for sharing that.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: I love it when I learn things too, on these episodes.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: All right, so somebody who's listening, somebody, they they're fighting calling their customers.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: But now that you've told them, I've told them and they've heard it about 17 other times in other podcast episodes minimum on this podcast so hopefully they're getting over the hump and they're calling their customers.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: They're going to understand a little bit with where they're at in the journey and why they're buying and what they need to be confirming on their website.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: If they're getting started with that strategy, then where do they start?
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Because I mean, what's the difference between having that information and not?
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Well, when they've got that information, then that that I mean nobody comes to work with the idea of doing a bad job.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: So if you can give the tools to your marketing team, whether that's a third-party agency or inside your staff, if you can say look, our top-of-funnel messaging needs to be focused around these sorts of things, because these are the kinds of events that happen in people's lives that cause them to suddenly become aware of the advertising.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Cause them to suddenly become aware of the advertising.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: When I do a talk that I do on the non-icky marketing funnel, I have the world's most boring slide.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: It's a white field with big gray blob in it and the point I'm making is the average American consumer is exposed to 6,000 to 10,000 marketing messages a day.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: It's just noise, and if you're going to break through that noise you need to resonate with where the perspective prospect is in their head.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: And so documenting that means that your marketing team knows what to talk about.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Marketing team knows what to talk about.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: And then when people get engaged with you mid-funnel and you understand what kind of research they're doing, what kind of obstacles they're trying to overcome, what kind of questions they have, then you can create an email marketing program that addresses that, recognizing that they're in the mid-funnel.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: All of these things are trust events that gradually build trust and relationship.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Your driving goal here is you don't want to sell something to someone.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: You want the purchase to be the next logical step in their journey.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: When that happens, you've created a relationship with your customer and they're much more likely to buy again.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Remember the first sale is not the most important sale.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: The second sale is the most important sale and if all you are is focused on that first sale, you're not going to get second sales.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: And the second sale is usually easier.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: It usually is easier if you've prepared the landscape, and then, once you get the second sale, the third sale is even easier, and that's why investing in strategy is important, because when you're building trust with people all the way through the marketing program, then the sale becomes yeah, obviously I need to do this now.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: It's a way back in the olden days I was the Jeep advertising manager and one of the things that I mean and I think most automotive companies know this that we talked about is people that were buying a house or having a child.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: You'd think that they're outlaying enough money, but no, they are more likely to buy a vehicle, Right Right Because and so they're paying attention to those ads when they're going into that process and I think a lot of people might be surprised to hear that.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Maybe some people are like, oh, that makes perfect sense, you know whatever, but it's information that if you know it, you can reach those people when they're there with the right message and the right graphics and the right text.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: And you know again, it appeals to them where they're at and where they're at in the process, and I think that that's really important.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: So, okay, so we've called our target audience our best customers.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: We know why they're buying from us, we understand where they're at in the journey and we're going to be creating that strategy by identifying what we need to talk about where they are in that journey.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: So again, top of funnel, awareness type things, middle of funnel, a little bit more into that consideration piece, and then the actual sale conversion and then the repurchase conversation Right, and then the repurchase conversation right, Because, as James is saying, that the most important piece here is going to be that second sale, because then that third, fourth, fifth get just a lot easier and people are going to keep coming back for more.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: If there's one thing, because we're headed into the end of the year, if there's one thing that you would suggest that the listeners of this episode do to jumpstart their strategy or taking a look into 2025 and where they're headed, what would it be, Start measuring things?
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: It surprises me.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: I imagine that you've run across this too.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: People are not measuring what they're doing.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: A client will come to us and will be okay, so you are spending all this time and energy on TikTok.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Are you getting any traction from it?
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Well, I don't know.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: This isn't complicated.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: There's a concept called UTM codes.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: They've been around for a long time.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: They're very easy to deal with.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: If you just add a UTM code to all of your links, then you can use Google Analytics to understand where's the traffic coming from and what kind of quality traffic is it, and how engaged are they with the website and etc.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: So a key thing about this is if you can't measure what you're doing, you don't know what's working and what's not working, and therefore everything is the same.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: If you do measure what you're doing, then very quickly you can follow that wonderful strategy water the flowers and prune the weeds right, but you have to know which is a flower and which is a weed, and you can't do that without measurement.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Yes, and for all of you listening, utm stands for something really complicated that doesn't make any sense.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: So I just say universal tracking measurement thing.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: But that's not what it stands for, just so y'all know Urchin tracking metrics yeah there you go, and then I just, I just, I just rename things when I don't like it, when I look them up and they don't make sense.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: It is free to create one of those.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Just type in Google create UTM and it will tell you how to do it and they actually offer it.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: And then Google analytics, also free, okay.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: So there's no excuse not to have those two pieces for any campaigns that you're running, any posts that you're doing.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Even a lot of social media schedulers will allow you to put in UTM codes for each of the different tracking pieces on the different platforms that you're doing.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: So just because you're having fun learning some TikTok dances good for you, doesn't necessarily mean that it's resulting in sales.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Or even traffic to your website and at the end of the day, you know that's the way I'll prescribe UTM codes, because I often talk about this and I'll often get that sort of deer in the headlights.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: My God, what is he on about?
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: If you've seen a URL and it's got all this long stuff at the end, but there's right after the domain, there's a question mark and then the long stuff, all that stuff after the question mark is a tracking pixel.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Amazon does it, all of them, facebook does it.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: They all do it.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: You can use that same advantage and put your own tracking pixel in there and then, when traffic comes to the website, google Analytics goes oh, here's information about this visitor and they will stream that off.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: So instead of it just being unrecognized source, it'll tell you is this came from Pinterest, this was the campaign, this was the X.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: You know you can get right down to a lot of detail.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: There are five different aspects to the UTM code, so it's not hard to do and it makes a world of difference if you actually can track what's working.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: Love that.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: So start tracking If you're not already.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Take a look at the tracking If you have been tracking, and analyze what's going on.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: And analyze what's going on.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Friend of mine.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: He has a web development company that he runs and they tracked something as simple as where their clients were coming from, like who was their clients, who was coming back, things like that.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: They were doing all this outreach to people that had built their websites 10, 15, 20 years ago, right, and hadn't updated it.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: They didn't get very much from them because they didn't really care about their websites.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: The people that updated three, six, nine, 15 months ago whatever those recent people wanted the best stuff available.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: They wanted to be having someone add those UTM codes for them.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: They wanted all of that information and they ended up being more profitable and a larger sales number.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: They got crickets from the other people.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: Remember what we talked about with RFM right?
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Recently Yep, so very cool, that's a great conversation, james.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Before I let you go, though, I do want to ask you the question that I ask everybody.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: This show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: I think the biggest lesson I've learned is have no fear.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: You know we're not dealing with, but try stuff.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: In context, there's another old direct marketing concept called test versus control.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: Your actual campaign is your control.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: That's the stuff that you know is working.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: Don't be afraid to try things.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: Don't be afraid to try new things.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Just make sure that you have the measurement tools in place so you can see what's working and what's not working.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: And if something is working or the test seems to be oh, this test turned out okay, don't immediately throw everything out and start again.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: Run a confirmation test, right?
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: That, I think, is the key thing that I've learned over the years is how important patience is in all of this.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: I can't tell you the number of times people have come to me and said well, we tried Google ads, didn't work, uh-huh, okay, how long did you run the campaign?
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know, three weeks.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: You didn't try Google ads.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: So patience is a really important thing.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: But and don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: You know, and this has been a fantastic conversation with James.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: If you'd like to check out his book Journey to Success Digital Marketing for Small Business Owners, you'll find the link to the Amazon book in the show notes or the description if you're watching on YouTube, so go ahead and scroll on down and check that out to learn more about his practical advice.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you are working on your 2025 marketing and business plan, then make sure that you start with the measurement.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: See what worked and what didn't work.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Don't be afraid to try new things, but make sure that you can measure it.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: If you don't know what worked and what didn't work in 2024, then let's start there and start identifying what's working and what's not working, and you can do that through measurement.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: That way, you don't have to spread yourself so thin on every single social channel and every other thing that's out there, right?
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: So compete with the big guys, do what they're doing and invest some time and effort into strategy.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Again, thank you so much for joining me today, james.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate it.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: I appreciate your practical approach to marketing and I think that a lot of people are going to get a lot of benefit from what you shared.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure Until next time.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Until next time.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Have a great rest of your day.