“Make sure you have a presence EVERYWHERE.” – Jonathan Boring, founder and president of Social Spice Media in Camarillo, California. In this episode, Jonathan offers his expertise on how to prepare your business for a transition or sale from a digital marketing standpoint.
Jonathan discusses how to best prepare your website for an upcoming exit, including staying up on regular maintenance and updates for the most seamless user experience. Simple things could be out-of-date, such as phone numbers, or entire submission forms could be broken on the back end. Either way, you don’t want to wait to hear about these issues from a client or a potential buyer.
He talks about the website auditing process that his company takes new clients through. First, they evaluate the good, the bad, and the ugly. Essentially, what is your company doing well, what could be done better, and what needs to be changed NOW. Then, an extensive report is run to paint a full picture of what is happening on the client’s website, including everything from Google ranking to key word gap analysis.
Jonathan dives deep into what it means to be ADA compliant for websites and why an owner should care. He shares simple changes you can make to your website to ensure you don’t face legal repercussions, including making sure you have a screen reader and all of your videos have an option for closed captioning.
He gives tips on how to optimize your email marketing campaigns, including the power of A/B testing and making sure you send out emails at the best possible times (Tuesday and Thursday mornings).
Lastly, he shares two action items for owners:
1. Audit your website regularly and ensure you are ADA compliant to avoid any unnecessary legal action or fines.
2. Make sure you have a presence across multiple channels. Omni-channel marketing is huge right now, so be sure your website is up-to-date, you have regular blog postings, and you are active across multiple social media platforms.
Disclosure: Information presented herein is for discussion and illustrative purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the speakers are as of the date of the recording and are subject to change. These views are not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities, and should not be relied on as financial, tax or legal advice. You should consult with your attorney, finance professional or accountant before implementing any transactions and/or strategies concerning your finances.
“Make sure you have a presence EVERYWHERE.” – Jonathan Boring, founder and president of Social Spice Media in Camarillo, California. In this episode, Jonathan offers his expertise on how to prepare your business for a transition or sale from a digital marketing standpoint.
Jonathan discusses how to best prepare your website for an upcoming exit, including staying up on regular maintenance and updates for the most seamless user experience. Simple things could be out-of-date, such as phone numbers, or entire submission forms could be broken on the back end. Either way, you don’t want to wait to hear about these issues from a client or a potential buyer.
He talks about the website auditing process that his company takes new clients through. First, they evaluate the good, the bad, and the ugly. Essentially, what is your company doing well, what could be done better, and what needs to be changed NOW. Then, an extensive report is run to paint a full picture of what is happening on the client’s website, including everything from Google ranking to key word gap analysis.
Jonathan dives deep into what it means to be ADA compliant for websites and why an owner should care. He shares simple changes you can make to your website to ensure you don’t face legal repercussions, including making sure you have a screen reader and all of your videos have an option for closed captioning.
He gives tips on how to optimize your email marketing campaigns, including the power of A/B testing and making sure you send out emails at the best possible times (Tuesday and Thursday mornings).
Lastly, he shares two action items for owners:
1. Audit your website regularly and ensure you are ADA compliant to avoid any unnecessary legal action or fines.
2. Make sure you have a presence across multiple channels. Omni-channel marketing is huge right now, so be sure your website is up-to-date, you have regular blog postings, and you are active across multiple social media platforms.
Disclosure: Information presented herein is for discussion and illustrative purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the speakers are as of the date of the recording and are subject to change. These views are not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities, and should not be relied on as financial, tax or legal advice. You should consult with your attorney, finance professional or accountant before implementing any transactions and/or strategies concerning your finances.
00:00:00:23 - 00:00:26:26
Joe Seetoo
Welcome to The Ripcord Moment, I'm your host, Joe Seetoo. Today we're joined by Jonathan Boring. He's the CEO and founder of Social Spice Media Company founded in 2012. They're located in Camarillo, California. And Social Spice Media focuses on leveraging technology, digital communications, and creative marketing solutions, to ultimately drive loyalty, client loyalty, sales, and revenue for their clients.
00:00:27:04 - 00:00:30:09
Joe Seetoo
Jonathan, welcome to our show today. I'm looking forward to our discussion.
00:00:31:04 - 00:00:33:17
Jonathan Boring
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on,
Joe, I'm really excited to be here.
00:00:33:29 - 00:00:57:15
Joe Seetoo
So obviously marketing, social media presence is critical for businesses to grow their brand, their awareness, their revenue, and if a client's ultimately looking to potentially sell their company, one of the things the acquirer is going to definitely look at is what their social media presence is. So talk to us a little bit about some of the critical things you help your clients with from a high level.
00:00:58:14 - 00:01:19:25
Jonathan Boring
Sure. You know, one of the first things that we start off with, we like to say is, your website is the cornerstone of all your online marketing. So you want to make sure that your website is in order so that looks good, it's easy to navigate. And we tell our clients to continue to do things to your website because things change.
00:01:20:16 - 00:01:50:16
Jonathan Boring
You know, sometimes phone numbers change, emails change, the person who is checking emails for leads changes. And that's one of the first things that we do when we sit down with a new client is we just test everything on their website to make sure contact forms are working, the address is still in the same spot, and we find about 30% of the time these things have changed or they're getting leads, but the person who's checking the leads is no longer at the company anymore or the phone number changed or something broke on the back end because once you build your website, you never quite look at it again.
00:01:51:17 - 00:02:12:16
Joe Seetoo
I mean, 30% strikes me as an incredibly high number considering that that's like, you know, nowadays that's the first thing people go to any time they're either looking for something or a recommendation is made, it's like, let's go to Google, put in the name and they go to that website, and that seems like a low hanging fruit for owners to shore up.
00:02:12:16 - 00:02:17:06
Joe Seetoo
And yet 30% again seems like they're not doing it. Why do you think that is?
00:02:17:27 - 00:02:37:14
Jonathan Boring
I think it's you know, we've been building it. We started as a social media marketing agency, you know, a decade ago. And then we've grown into a full blown online marketing agency. So as we're going through this journey, what I found is even with ourselves, is that you spend a lot of time building a website as a business owner, you're making sure the words are correct,
00:02:37:14 - 00:03:00:29
Jonathan Boring
the imaging, everything reflects who you are, and you're going to spend probably many days working on this. And then when you're done, you don't go back to your website, all your clients do and your potential customers go back, but you're done with it. You know, you're looking at other people's websites and your potential clients. And so you just, you know, you become the shoemaker's kid, I guess, you know, where you just you're not looking at your own stuff anymore.
00:03:02:00 - 00:03:12:15
Jonathan Boring
And then somebody will say, hey, you know, your website has been down for three weeks and, you know, that's probably the worst thing in the world to know that you've been dead in the water for three weeks or certain things aren't working.
00:03:13:08 - 00:03:19:28
Joe Seetoo
And the sales and the revenue are going down, right, and they never take the time to think about, well, gee, maybe something on our website's causing a jam.
00:03:21:03 - 00:03:37:10
Jonathan Boring
I mean, a lot of times, as I said, it's simple fixes. And a lot of times you can go in and you can get those things fixed within a matter of hours and have those things fixed while we're still building a new website. But you just want to make sure all those things are working or that it could be just as easy as somebody is not checking
00:03:37:10 - 00:03:50:00
Jonathan Boring
say the lead generation form on the website anymore, that person's gone, or it wasn't written in the training manual that this is part of the job description.
00:03:50:14 - 00:04:08:05
Joe Seetoo
You bring up an incredibly good point by saying it needs to be in the training manual that these things that maybe people overlook or think are simple or take for granted that they have to be documented and procedurally followed and implemented so that it's a part of the DNA of the business.
00:04:08:24 - 00:04:22:20
Jonathan Boring
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I can see it, you know, from my own perspective. You know, when I started, I was a one man band working out of my third bedroom and, you know, I knew it all up here in my head. And now we're going to have, you know, 12, 14 people running around here.
00:04:22:20 - 00:04:36:17
Jonathan Boring
And it's like, you know, I don't know what each position is supposed to be doing unless we write it down, because there's a lot of little things that need to be done with each little position. And there's no way one person can keep it all up there anymore.
00:04:36:27 - 00:04:53:13
Joe Seetoo
Absolutely. Going back to what you do for clients on this notion of a website audit, like I think you have a standardized process that you end up putting your clients through. Talk to us a little bit about what that process is and how that goes.
00:04:54:19 - 00:05:11:18
Jonathan Boring
Yes, so we have two audits when people come to us. The first one, we give them we name the good, the bad, and the ugly, just sounded fun. And we started internally and now we just branded it as the good, the bad and the ugly. And what we do is we go in and we say, this is what you're doing good.
00:05:12:21 - 00:05:35:24
Jonathan Boring
This is what's OK. And then these things are definitely things that need to be fixed on your website. Sometimes you find that, you know, there's broken links, there's missing words, sometimes things have just disappeared. And so we come through, we run, you know, anywhere from a 15 to 30 page report talking about everything that's happening with their website, even where they're ranking on Google.
00:05:36:08 - 00:05:53:23
Jonathan Boring
And then we also do what we call a keyword gap analysis. So if you're trying to figure out what your competitors are ranking for, let's say on keywords and what you're not ranking for, we can see and then we can actually build a pipeline so that way you can actually start competing with your competitor on the keywords that you're not ranking on.
00:05:54:09 - 00:06:14:11
Joe Seetoo
That sounds like an incredibly thorough process, Jonathan, if it's a 15 to 30 page report on the good, the bad, and the ugly, I mean that's just a lot of material, a lot of digging and homework that you guys are providing relative to the clients content, coupled with this other analytics that you're providing.
00:06:14:11 - 00:06:30:09
Joe Seetoo
So it sounds like that's pretty impactful. And I'm assuming there are sort of homework and takeaway that the client needs to then do with it to obviously improve their website. Do you have a follow up process with them typically thereafter?
00:06:31:12 - 00:06:51:27
Jonathan Boring
So I mean, typically when they're coming to us, they know something's wrong, they just don't know exactly what it is. For instance, we had one client who came to us and he said, Hey, we hired a computer guy who said he knew what he was doing and he broke a couple of things. So we hired another computer guy who said that he was even better than that guy and he broke more things
00:06:51:27 - 00:06:52:18
Joe Seetoo
He broke more things.
00:06:52:27 - 00:07:14:04
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. He said, so we let him go, and now we needed to go to somebody who actually hopefully knows what they're doing, and of course it was a referral. And he said, so, you know, can you tell me what's broken and what needs to be fixed? And, you know, at that point when you're saying, well, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but, you know, there's alt tags and H1 tags, and all these other things that Google looks at. plus if you have broken links on your website.
00:07:14:04 - 00:07:30:17
Jonathan Boring
And if you're an e-commerce site, all of these things don't look good. So of course, the next phase is what do we need to correct these things? And then typically it's what do we need to correct? And then what are the next course of action that we need to take to start driving more traffic to our website?
00:07:31:26 - 00:07:53:29
Joe Seetoo
So talking about that, let's pivot the conversation to driving traffic, right? This idea of generating leads through social media, it's a little bit of like a black box thing to us laypeople. But, you know, talk to us a little bit about how you help clients optimize their website, how they're able to generate leads, what the secret sauce maybe is.
00:07:54:23 - 00:08:15:28
Jonathan Boring
You know, it's interesting because that's a moving target. I had to give another speech earlier in the year and it was about, you know, marketing trends this year. And I had to rewrite the whole speech just because what we did two years ago, we've pretty much thrown that playbook out the window and are coming up with a whole new playbook just as social media has changed, content is becoming more, you know, content is king these days.
00:08:16:11 - 00:08:36:08
Jonathan Boring
Google's ranking things, there's Google My Business, which is now changed to Google Business Profile, which is now trying to compete with the social media companies that are out there. And we actually now rate content so we can actually see if it's original content and then we can put a score of 0 to 100 based on every page on your website.
00:08:36:08 - 00:08:49:18
Jonathan Boring
And we're finding that scores of over 80% or a score of 80, generates 30% more bids on average than scores under 80.
00:08:49:18 - 00:09:14:19
Joe Seetoo
It sounds like now, at least from where I think probably the industry was a couple of years ago now getting very granular on how to, like you said, score specific content and then link metrics to how that is influencing revenue and the sales process for a business is something that you're able to do and help clients really become more aware of and thoughtful in.
00:09:15:16 - 00:09:33:23
Jonathan Boring
Yeah, absolutely, because not only are you going to look at the content and make sure that it's, you know, it's keyword rich, you know, targeted. But what kind of a company are you? Like you guys probably have some pretty buttoned up content, plus you have FINRA and all the other things that you have to worry about.
00:09:33:29 - 00:09:50:14
Jonathan Boring
And then you have like the eCommerce sites that want to be a little bit more fun, so you want to make sure that it's good content, but it's written for the audience that's going to be reading the content. And you know, a lot of times Google says, you know, write your content at a sixth or seventh grade level just like a newspaper, because that's what people understand.
00:09:51:02 - 00:09:57:11
Jonathan Boring
And like we work with a lot of attorneys and attorneys are wordsmiths and they like to show you how smart they are because they use really big words.
00:09:57:11 - 00:10:00:19
Joe Seetoo
And they spend all that time in law school, right?
00:10:01:12 - 00:10:17:09
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. But, you know, your average person like myself doesn't understand you know, these big, you know, 25 cent words. Just tell me what you do in a nice, easy to understand page So it's writing for your audience at the end of the day and making sure that they can understand it.
00:10:17:19 - 00:10:38:22
Joe Seetoo
Yeah. Now it's interesting how, you know technology and now you're talking about marketing, obviously knowing your audience is sort of rule number one. In terms of the data analytics. I want to dig into this a little bit more. I mean, what additionally should owners be considering beyond what you shared just a minute ago, when they're looking at the data and the analytics?
00:10:40:13 - 00:11:10:16
Jonathan Boring
Sure. You know, so as I like to jokingly say, which is half truths, you know, marketing is just trying different things. It's making educated guesses and trying things. And your analytics is telling you what's actually working, what's not working. You know, when I grew up my dad was in marketing and we did a lot of email campaigns. So back then you spent, you know, two or three months putting together a direct mail campaign, you mail it out to the East Coast, you waited two weeks to see that they used the promo code
00:11:10:16 - 00:11:30:04
Jonathan Boring
when they call back and you got 1/10th of 1% of a return, you high five and say, that was the successful campaign. But really, no one was successful. And today, you know, you can write a blog, you can put out an email blast, and you can know within probably 24 to 48 hours if it's successful or not.
00:11:30:04 - 00:11:53:03
Jonathan Boring
And you can actually change the direction of what you're doing based on the successes that are happening. Or if things aren't happening, you can say, well, we don't want to tackle that anymore, let's go into these areas. The analytics tell you everything these days: how long people are coming to your site, what they're reading, where they're coming from, males, gender, age.
00:11:53:15 - 00:12:09:22
Jonathan Boring
You can see so much on the background of what people are engaging with you these days. You know what the site map is, you know, when they get to your home page, where are they going after that? Why are they going to the next page? You know, and then you lead them on this sales journey basically through your website of what you're looking for.
00:12:10:06 - 00:12:44:23
Joe Seetoo
And then are you helping out, I mean, I would think that for the average middle market business owner that they are you know, unless you're at a huge company where you've got all kinds of technicians and professionals looking at this on a regular basis, that most owners, because they're so busy doing other things in the business and serving their clients like they probably don't have a thoughtful, structured strategy in place about even what a good outcome would be other than perhaps, you know, direct leads coming in.
00:12:45:01 - 00:13:00:25
Joe Seetoo
But the other, you know, the other analytics in between that build up to that. So are you helping them with sort of forecasting and setting priorities on, hey, here's a good outcome for this kind of traffic? Like here's what would be good at this stage along the way?
00:13:01:15 - 00:13:20:21
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. We come through and yeah, we look at where they're at and then we can kind of forecast where we think they should be trending. And then it ends on, you know, sometimes if it is a big company and they have an internal team and we're supporting the team and sometimes we are the outsource team for the company.
00:13:20:21 - 00:13:41:00
Jonathan Boring
So it depends a little bit on who are working for and a lot of times it's figuring out what their end goal is for their marketing. You know, like Budweiser is going to be institutional in marketing right? They just have got a lot of money to spend and you just want to see Budweiser everywhere so they don't really care where it's at versus smaller companies who say,
00:13:41:07 - 00:13:47:07
Jonathan Boring
you know, we only got a few thousand dollars a month to spend and we need to be very impactful to drive business or drive sales.
00:13:47:17 - 00:13:49:26
Joe Seetoo
We need the best bang for the buck there for that one, right?
00:13:50:20 - 00:14:05:00
Jonathan Boring
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we can start you know, we've started with larger companies and say we want to do everything under the sun because we can and other people that say, you know, that there's just a few thousand dollars and you know, if you can make this successful we can expand it from there.
00:14:05:00 - 00:14:21:26
Joe Seetoo
If we can, let's pivot the conversation to something that I know you're very well versed in and also I think passionate about, and it's something that is becoming more prevalent, and it's this notion of being ADA compliant with your website, you know, why is it something an owner should care about?
00:14:23:17 - 00:14:48:18
Jonathan Boring
Holy cow. That's a big question. You know the laws changed in 2018 to become ADA compliant for websites, it's very similar to when attorneys were coming up and saying hey your handicap sign is a foot too low we're going to sue you for $4,000 or whatever it is. And before they needed to have an inspector maybe somebody coming in with a wheelchair saying that the sink was too low.
00:14:48:28 - 00:15:17:12
Jonathan Boring
Now you can run your website through an online tool and find out where your site is not ADA accessible or Americans with Disabilities, and each infraction is $4,000 and a lot of these are troll attorneys. There's I think three law firms that were in charge of almost 57% of all the lawsuits that were filed last year. Nationwide? Yeah, but most of them are in California and New York, based on the federal laws.
00:15:17:19 - 00:15:17:28
Joe Seetoo
OK.
00:15:18:19 - 00:15:43:06
Jonathan Boring
California has Unruh, and now we're getting kind of into a legal area which is not my expertize, but there is, you know, the Unruh Act and a few other things in New York make it a lot more prevalent to sue companies for non-compliant websites in those states. And starting in 2018, we had people coming to us to make their sites compliant as an insurance policy.
00:15:43:06 - 00:15:54:18
Jonathan Boring
And now we're probably getting 10 to 15 calls a week from people who are getting demand letters or are being sued and we'll talk a little more about this, that last year alone there were 400,000 demand letters that were sent out.
00:15:54:21 - 00:15:55:10
Joe Seetoo
400,000?
00:15:56:02 - 00:16:02:10
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. Almost half a million demand letters and that's up another 20% this year. I guess these are just shakedowns.
00:16:02:22 - 00:16:29:07
Joe Seetoo
Sure. So that certainly is why an owner needs to care. And we can imagine that the last thing, if an owner again, because we're focusing on educating business owners or thinking about some sort of succession event, especially sales from a third party, that if they get slapped with litigation over something that I'm guessing is a relatively easy fix, hopefully and you'll tell us about that, that's not the kind of headache they want to be dealing with when they're contemplating an exit.
00:16:30:02 - 00:16:36:26
Joe Seetoo
What are some of the specific things that would make a website non-compliant with the ADA regulations?
00:16:38:07 - 00:16:58:06
Jonathan Boring
So one of the first things you want to make sure you have a screen reader so that way the screen reader can actually read the website to somebody who's visually impaired, that's the first thing that they would look at. Next thing is what they call an alt tag, which is a tag on an image. So you know, like when you cover your cursor over an image, it'll normally say and what that image is.
00:16:58:15 - 00:17:18:08
Jonathan Boring
So making sure that there's an alt tag so when the screen reader is actually reading the screen, it can see the image and then say, woman gardening, so that way you have the alt tags. If you have a PDF on your website, the screen reader looks at a PDF like an image, but can't read it, so you need to convert these PDFs to HTML pages that can be read.
00:17:19:02 - 00:17:43:23
Jonathan Boring
You have to be able to adjust the contrast, the font size. If there's videos on your site that have words or sounds, you also need to make sure they're closed captioned. So let's just say you have a video and there's music playing, it's a marketing video. It would say, music playing at the bottom. So all of these things need to be,
00:17:44:00 - 00:18:03:21
Jonathan Boring
and then you got to make sure that the whole website can be navigated by your keyboard. So our team goes in and that's one of the other audits that we do is we do an assessment to take a look and tell people if their site's compliant and how compliant it is, because a lot of these attorneys will come through and they'll only just pick one or two pieces that are out of compliance,
00:18:03:21 - 00:18:26:25
Jonathan Boring
and then they'll file a demand letter or a lawsuit based on those two pieces. And they'll say, can you fix these? And we're like, we can but you're still out of compliance in these areas. So we let them know the scope of work is. Conversely, the good part of this is, number one by making your site compliant it does open it up to another 20% of the American public that does have disabilities,
00:18:26:25 - 00:18:45:22
Jonathan Boring
so there's a win there. There's also a $5,000 tax credit that the IRS is offering. A federal tax credit? Yeah, I just looked at our taxes yesterday and you know, there's a certain form on there and I'm like, there it is, $5,000 that they can take off.
00:18:45:22 - 00:18:50:04
Joe Seetoo
I've never heard of that and I don't think I've actually heard one CPA bring that up.
00:18:51:26 - 00:19:10:06
Jonathan Boring
You know, we happened to stumble upon it last year and we started talking about it and you know, we're doing it ourselves and got the tax credit and, you know, it works. So, you know, the government is now incentivizing people to do it. And the other thing that we've seen is we've seen people getting demand letters and getting sued,
00:19:10:06 - 00:19:21:19
Jonathan Boring
they've paid us to do the audit and we found out they're not out of compliance at all. So we fill out a report, send it back, and make sure the case goes away. That doesn't happen very often, but we have had that happen a few times.
00:19:22:08 - 00:19:36:05
Joe Seetoo
OK, well, the other thing I guess I would wrap it up with here, it sounds like at least on this point, is having someone who is knowledgeable, as you are, who knows these laws, building it right from the get go,
00:19:37:29 - 00:19:56:01
Joe Seetoo
saves a lot of these issues versus, you know, finding out after the fact and then having to bring somebody else in you know, bringing you in to then shore up the work that wasn't done right to begin with. I want to go back to one of the things that I think you had mentioned in one of our discussions and that is this idea of content scoring,
00:19:57:06 - 00:20:07:18
Joe Seetoo
and is there more to that that really helps, again, an owner think through their social media strategy?
00:20:12:08 - 00:20:13:28
Jonathan Boring
I'm not sure I understand the question.
00:20:15:00 - 00:20:30:28
Joe Seetoo
No, we talked about it in terms of some of the things that owners want to think about this idea of content scoring, and maybe we covered it all, was there anything else we wanted to share in terms of your pearls of wisdom that owners want to do on that?
00:20:31:21 - 00:20:49:15
Jonathan Boring
Sure. So we have our own, you know, software that we created that we actually run it through. So we basically would take a page in the URL, we actually run it through our own system, and then we come up with the content score. So that can be on blog post, you know, your home page or about us page.
00:20:49:15 - 00:21:07:02
Jonathan Boring
So we look at each page individually and then we also say this is the type of audience that it should be written for and how is it ranking, how's the keyword ranking, so that way we can come through. And sometimes it just takes a few little tweaks and sometimes it's a complete rewrite. But most of the time they're headed in the right direction.
00:21:07:02 - 00:21:15:00
Jonathan Boring
They just, as I said, content is king these days and how Google, you know, and really now you're talking to Google, you know how Google is reading it.
00:21:15:00 - 00:21:15:16
Joe Seetoo
00:21:16:02 - 00:21:28:06
Jonathan Boring
And the nice thing is you can actually fix and change things on your site and then ask Google to reindex your website. So within 24 hours you can actually have a whole new listing on Google.
00:21:28:07 - 00:21:42:19
Joe Seetoo
So it sounds like you're really bridging the connection between the owner there and these engines, like a Google to optimize the sites based on the software that you've written that really fleshes out what's optimal.
00:21:43:06 - 00:21:48:06
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. And I think kind of what you're saying too is at the end of the day, the business owners don't want to worry about this stuff.
00:21:48:07 - 00:21:49:29
Joe Seetoo
No, they don't. They really don't.
00:21:50:12 - 00:22:18:26
Jonathan Boring
You know, and there's nothing more embarrassing for a business owner than for somebody to say, hey, your website's been down, or we're trying to contact you and we can't get a hold of you. You know, I mean, that hits you right in the heart as a business owner. So, you know, what we do is we make sure that we put a lot of stopgaps in so like if you're hosted with GoDaddy, you know, you're calling GoDaddy and going through that whole 800 number, trying to figure out, you know, how to change an image record to get your website back up and running versus, you know, we have things that tell us when things
00:22:18:26 - 00:22:33:08
Jonathan Boring
aren't happening and we can actually call the owners and say, hey, this is what's happening. This is the fixes that we're putting in. Don't worry about it. It's under control. It'll be done by, you know, 5:00 tonight, something like that. I think that as partners, that's what you want, right?
00:22:33:26 - 00:22:49:11
Joe Seetoo
Absolutely. Want someone who's proactive, who you know, is reliable, and they're getting the job done in a timely manner so that, you know, the owners can focus on the most important thing in terms of managing their business, growing their business, their clientele, their staff, whatever it might be.
00:22:49:29 - 00:22:51:11
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. They need to do what they do best.
00:22:51:21 - 00:23:05:25
Joe Seetoo
Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of email marketing, I mean, it is still out there. What are your thoughts on, again, pearls of wisdom that you would share related to email marketing?
00:23:05:25 - 00:23:46:19
Jonathan Boring
Number one, I've been talk a lot about this is don't send out email marketing around holidays. You know, I find, you know, now on social media and emails is that a lot of people are using Christmas, to wish you a merry Christmas, and you've never heard from before. Just to get their brand exposure, so I tend to stay away from those but try AB testing, try different images, try different subjects, and there are programs out there where you can send out two different emails to 10 percent of your audience and then whichever one has the best open record, it will send the rest of the 80% to the highest open rate.
00:23:46:19 - 00:23:47:04
Jonathan Boring
Oh, wow.
00:23:48:28 - 00:24:09:29
Jonathan Boring
Try it. You know, we have a certain recommendation on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 10 and 2 to send out emails, typically because it's not a Monday, it's not a Friday, it's not in the middle of the week, just off days. But we've also found sometimes Sunday night, 10:00 or 6 a.m. on a Sunday works best, you know, maybe like financial people who get up early and want to get a head start on their day.
00:24:09:29 - 00:24:15:22
Jonathan Boring
So experiment with the different times and days that you're sending things out.
00:24:15:22 - 00:24:31:25
Joe Seetoo
Can you contact everybody who sends me emails and tell them not to send it to me on a Monday because I feel like I get bombarded by email on Mondays and I actually read something where it said people who are busy, they don't enjoy getting emails on Mondays. And I say, actually, that resonated with me when I read that article.
00:24:33:00 - 00:24:37:04
Joe Seetoo
So I think it's to your point and it's why Tuesdays and Thursdays probably are the most optimal times.
00:24:37:25 - 00:24:58:04
Jonathan Boring
Yeah. And then for us to, you know, in this day and age, you know, the hard sell is gone. You need to be a thought leader. You need to provide expertize, you need to provide bits of information for people to keep coming back to you. You know, I think the old adage in sales is that, you know, somebody needs to see seven or eight times or hear your name seven or eight times for them to want to do business with you.
00:24:58:05 - 00:25:15:05
Jonathan Boring
So that means they trust you and they've seen you. So the person who always has got their hand out saying, buy from me, is the person you don't hear from. The person who's telling you what to expect coming down the road, things, you know, to watch out for is the person that you're going to eventually want to do business with.
00:25:15:05 - 00:25:20:19
Jonathan Boring
So be helpful, be a thought leader, and put yourself out there. I mean, look what you're doing here today. I mean, it's great.
00:25:20:28 - 00:25:22:06
Joe Seetoo
Yeah.
00:25:22:20 - 00:25:24:05
Jonathan Boring
It's just one more value that you add to your clients.
00:25:24:27 - 00:26:01:08
Joe Seetoo
John, I think your thoughts are well taken, you mentioned content is king, right? And so thoughtful content that is demonstrating that thought leadership, that is adding value to the audience that you're serving is how someone wants to build their social media presence. And so I'm going to pivot to start to wrap us up here because we had a wonderful conversation but I call this the Ripcord Moment and I ask our guests to always share two action items that our owners can think about doing sooner rather than later, so that when they're thinking about their succession event, their parachute is ready for that jump, their ripcord won't fail.
00:26:01:08 - 00:26:11:02
Joe Seetoo
And so from a social media marketing standpoint, what are the two action items that you would encourage owners to think about sooner than later to implement?
00:26:11:21 - 00:26:32:10
Jonathan Boring
Sure. You know, I think one we talked about a lot was the ADA compliance. I mean, make sure your ADA compliant, you know I hate scare tactic sales. And I hate sounding like that guy, but I mean, we just see it too often. So make sure your ADA compliant. And number two, right now, omni channel marketing is a big thing.
00:26:32:10 - 00:26:49:27
Jonathan Boring
So make sure that you have a presence everywhere, so your website looks good, that you're writing blogs, that you have emails that are going out, that you're on social media, you're on LinkedIn, you know, you're creating videos, you have a chat function on your website, do all these things. It increases the opportunity by about 300% versus just one channel alone.
00:26:50:23 - 00:27:01:12
Joe Seetoo
Multiple channels, that thought leadership on those channels, and making sure you're ADA compliant. I love it. Jonathan, if someone wanted to get a hold of you from our audience, what's the best way they can reach out to you?
00:27:02:03 - 00:27:21:09
Jonathan Boring
Sure. You can email jon@socialspicemedia.com, or you can call the office 805-482-8312 and ask for me, we love to help people and even if they had questions and needed the direction, we're always here to help.
00:27:21:28 - 00:27:34:25
Joe Seetoo
No, I love it. Jon, thanks for your time today, sharing your pearls of wisdom. Love what you're doing out there in the community. We're going to sign off. This is Joe Seetoo, signing off from The Ripcord Moment, and we'll catch you next time.
00:27:36:16 - 00:27:38:17
Jonathan Boring
Thanks, Joe, I appreciate it, it's great opportunity.