3 Paths To Effective Ads – Websites.ca Talk Ep. 51

Sean Corbett:
Hello everybody. Sean Corbett here. Websites.ca marketing. What I’d like to attempt in this episode is to demystify the marketing process a little bit for you. So we’re going to try to focus on how to find a clear and effective messaging for all your advertising no matter what form it takes on. A lot of you who are listening have probably heard formulas for headlines, maybe read tactics and tricks to persuade people. Oftentimes when companies sit down to make an advertisement, they’ll just make increasingly bolder claims in their marketing, and I’d really just like to show you a better way of doing things. So to that end, I brought up my friend Craig Bond. He’s a senior product marketing manager for a major software company. I’ll leave it up to him if he wants to tell you who that company is. What we’re going to do today, excuse me, is we’re going to explain some of the process that these larger corporations, these places that have big budgets, big teams, what they use to come up with effective ad campaigns. And we want to give you three different approaches that you can use in your own business. And like I said at the start, that could even be for signage, for flyers, for emails, whatever you like. So Craig, thanks for being here today.

Craig Bond:
Hey, thanks for having me, Sean. It’s really nice to be here.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, for sure. So before we get into it too much, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about your background and then also what you’re responsible for in your current role.

Craig Bond:
Sure, yeah, absolutely. So I’ve got about a 10 year history in specifically product marketing, although I have dabbled in other forms of marketing. And the thing about product marketing is it pretty much touches every facet of the business, from sales to the lead generation teams to e-commerce and everything. So we are pretty much rolled into the entire organization and enable the organization with positioning and messaging. So I’m very closely tied to these teams, tied to the go-to-market motions and strategies, and then the development of campaigns for lead generation. So a lot of that we have to make sure that we have laser focused messaging and positioning and that we’re resonating with our target audiences. So I started my career early overseas in Taiwan and later China. While I was in China I was working at Lenovo and they’re obviously a pretty major producer of computers and also mobile devices. So I led go to market and product marketing strategy globally for Lenovo. And when I came back to Canada, I ended up working for a satellite company called OrbComm and now am with a software company called Alludo. So I lead two of the four flagship Alludo brands at the moment and have a team there and sort of deal with this stuff every day. So that’s a bit about me.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, nice. And again, the hammer is the point home as well that the stuff works worldwide. One doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel even in different cultures and different languages. So I know just for the listener’s sake, you and I know each other from a completely different time, which is when we were both making independent cinema. And again, before we get into the specifics of what we are going to talk about today, and I know you’ve been doing your product marketing for a long time, but do you feel that that coming from the indie cinema world, making movies, writing movies, that kind of thing, does that inform what you do at all in your current position?

Craig Bond:
Yeah, I think it does completely. And in fact, that’s originally why I got into marketing because my film career was coming to an end, so to speak. But during that time I had always dabbled in marketing, creation of websites, selling products online and that sort of thing. So I’ve always had an interest, but particularly the writing and the creative aspect of it, although it’s a very different medium, I think the same, there’s a lot of synergies there and how it applies to marketing. There’s knowing who your target audience is with the films that you’re creating, there’s the creative aspect of it in terms of storytelling and writing in order to effectively convey those messages on the screen. And then just in terms of managing those productions, there’s a lot that goes into a film production the same way that there’s a lot that goes into go to market of a new product or offer and the development and deployment of a campaign. So although the two disciplines are very different, there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of synergies there in terms of the things that you’re doing. So lots that can apply from one to the other.

Sean Corbett:
And I think ultimately the end result is to tweak the emotions of the audience and that applies to both. And then also, yeah, what you said, not a lot of people are aware even if you write or edit or direct movies or what have you, or even if you’re a marketing guy in a company, there’s stages of work. There’s times when you’re stuck up in a room alone and it’s quiet and you’re thinking, but there’s also massive production times for both managing teams and budgets and time pressures and so on. So they overlap in an interesting way. Absolutely. Craig, you and I were talking before the show and I do want to give that context to the listeners and sort of set the stage for everything else we’re going to do today. When I come across a lot of folks who are asking for help with marketing, sometimes it seems to me people think that creative, being creative, like you mentioned, means like woo woo stuff or using fancy words or using big bold claims. But to illustrate a point, you and I each talked about how we passed by a small local business and we read their signs and each of us had completely different reactions to the signs. So I think this frames the conversation in the correct way. I was hoping maybe why don’t you tell me about the sign you saw and then I’ll tell you about mine, and then it’ll give people an idea of what we’ve been talking about.

Craig Bond:
So because I’m a do marketing every day, I think I’m more acutely aware of it than the average person. And recently, I think it was a couple months ago, I had my car in the shop and I was just taking a walk around the neighborhood waiting for it to be finished. I came across this one shop, and I don’t remember exactly what the slogan was, but it was something along the lines of we do it better. I stopped in my tracks trying to figure out what this company is. I looked at the name on the sign, I looked at the graphics and the images that they had kind of on their windows because their whole windows were covered in fancy design graphics and things like that. And then a slogan, we do it better. And so I thought to myself, I have no idea what this business does.
What do they do better? Do they have that same slogan on their business cards? Do they have that same slogan on their website? I’m not sure. But what I did think was that doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t know what this business is. I don’t know what it does. So I went up, I looked through the window, I tried to figure it out, and I think I figured out that they make custom deckels and things like that, or custom signage and that sort of thing. But the fact that we do it better, slogan didn’t tell me anything, made me wonder how could a business that actually improve their messaging? Because you’ve got, that’s their main slogan. So in two to five words, usually more than two, but let’s say three to five words, if you can tell your entire value proposition of your service in that short slogan, that should be the ultimate goal. So aside from how good the business looked, the slogan absolutely wasn’t telling me anything.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s kind of funny. I mean, again, you noticed it because you like said you’re attuned to marketing stuff, but the average person would, it’d have the opposite effect on the average person. They would just gloss over it. Now then I contrast that with my story, which was that I was driving cross country in Canada a few years back and I wanted to pay attention to all the billboards and just see if there was anything interesting happening. I have not really ever done any billboard advertising. And like you said, you have a very limited amount of time with signage and billboards and bus benches, typically one sentence, one short sentence, excuse me. And so I just wanted to see what people were doing out there. And it was from Ontario to BC that I drove. Everything was completely forgettable or just very pat corporate, boring, vague, whatever, until I got past a gas station in rural Saskatchewan.
And as we pull out of the gas station now, we didn’t need to stop. So I was not looking for any services. Again, I was just reading the billboards for fun to pass the time on the drive. And we passed by a sign that had a little right turn arrow and it said waffles, wifi. And I thought there could be no more perfect signage on the entire drive and for the rest of the drive, I tried to think of ways I could improve on that sign and I couldn’t think of any. And so you and I were talking, right, in terms of writing, you got the alliteration. Both words start with a W, you have the waffles that the kids want in the car, and you have the wifi that the parents want in the car, and you’ve got a call to action in the form of an arrow telling people to turn into this local motel.
So, and why I brought this up, why we’re telling everybody this contrasting story is because when we talk about coming from a background of films, Craig, and you talk about being creative and coordinating all these teams and bringing a message to market, there’s definitely aspects of creativity involved in that for sure. But some folks who are on the outside of that get lost and think, well, I’m not a writer, I’m not a creative person. I can’t come up with ads. Well, the truth of the matter is that waffles and wifi was about as good as you could do. There’s no way you could improve upon that for that moment in that place to get me to take an action. So I think that frames the conversation. So moving forward here, let’s give people some actionable stuff. I’d like to talk about what I call the is three different approaches that someone can use to come up with a marketing message and the classic one that people tell you is the wrong way to do it.
It’s not the most effective way in most cases, but I still think it can be effective. It’s talking about features. The second way is to talk about benefits, what the buyer gets, and the third way is to tell a story or spin a narrative that sort of proves the product’s uses and has social proof and all those kind of things. So I was hoping from your point of view, because you manage these messages with so many team members, could you give me a brief rundown or give the listeners a brief rundown of what each one of those things means, features, benefits, and story?

Craig Bond:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a really good way to break it down simply, and I love your story about the sign because it provides context as to where and when you might want to use that. If I’m in, say, a major city, let’s say Toronto, and I’m driving down the highway and I see waffles, wifi, I don’t think it’s going to be as effective as it was in Saskatchewan. When I’m driving cross country and I need wifi and I’m hungry, I want waffles and wifi. So it was the perfect space to use that. And when you come back to features, benefits, and telling a story to spin a narrative, I mean, that was both benefit driven, that message, and that was also telling a bit of a story. So looking at my job right now, because I’m marketing software, and this could apply to anywhere, but let’s use software as an example. Let features it’s tried and true. You can come out, you can talk about features, you can say what they do, and then

Sean Corbett:
Let’s give the people an example. A feature would be whatever, some 24 bit security or nightly backups or the one click button, one click process. Those would be the examples of features

Craig Bond:
Or multiple batch processing of files or things like that. So that’s a specific feature. And then there’s the opposite way to look at it as a benefit, right? Well, we’re going to increase your team’s productivity by X amount by using the features that we’re providing. So for instance, let’s say I install custom doors as a business. Well, I could say, Hey, we have the nicest doors. They’re good quality. And so that’s more feature driven. Whereas if you say a benefit, we’re going to keep your house warmer because we’ve got really solid insulation around the doors. No air is going to get through. We’re going to save you energy costs, we’re going to do all of these things. So that’s more of a benefit driven approach, whereas a story-driven approach might be something like a guy sitting, let’s say this is a social post and you’re doing a short video or something. It’s a guy sitting in his living room and he is freezing and he got jacket around him. So it’s telling the story that there’s somebody that’s freezing in the house and by installing our doors, it’s going to warm it up. But there’s different periods where you might want to use these. So neither is better than the other, but I think it’s about the time when you might apply these to different situations,

Sean Corbett:
What kind of audience you have, like you said in the waffles, wifi example, what else is around? So if you’re the only Russian tea shop in the whole area, I don’t think you have to get, and there’s no other tea stores or coffee stores or whatever. I don’t think that you have to get super fancy. You can just tell people the one unique thing that you do based on a feature. And again, to clarify for the audience, it’s like features is what it does, and a benefit is what you get, and a story is less focused on you and less focused on the product. So a good example, I think, or the best example of storytelling that not a lot of small businesses can use is the celebrity endorsement. I was so and so celebrity, I don’t know, we’re in Canada, so let’s pick something goofy.
Here’s a story about Justin Bieber’s new mansion and everything was new and beautiful and amazing. And then he noticed that yeah, there was a draft and there were bugs coming in every day and he had whatever, and then he fixed the door and everything was nice and his wife wasn’t sick anymore, blah, blah, blah. So obviously you can’t necessarily do that with your marketing if you don’t have a celebrity endorsement, but you can come up with, that’s sort of where the creativity comes in. And a lot of people might consider that, well, I could say they might consider it lying. You might sit down and you might come up with a story that didn’t necessarily happen, but it illustrates what the product does for people, and it does it in a way without making a claim. I think that’s the biggest thing I keep coming back to in our conversation is as much as possible, you don’t want to make too many claims, at least until you’ve proven your concept out to people, that they’re very aware of what you’re doing and that you have some credibility.
So if I go, like you said at the start, oh, it’s the best material. Well, first of all, what the heck does that even mean best is such a crazy claim to make because I might want pine, and you might want, oh, could someone else might want steel? So best for what in that case, and again, people say don’t do features based marketing because it’s not focused on the reader. That’s mostly true you and I have talked about, but there’s a big difference between saying the best door and 100% solid, blah, blah, blah, material door one’s believable. If you can show a picture and prove the thing that’s a believable feature, best is not a believable feature. So that’s the distinction there. And I think honestly, I’m a little nervous because we come from that creative world. I’m much more fascinated with can I pick an effective message for that product or service and for that audience that is as meat and potatoes as simple and straightforward as possible. And that comes back to the whole point of our talk today is making things clear. A clear message could be creative and impactful and emotional.
A clear message could be very simple language that just tells you what you get. But what it must not do is in your deco example, it must not leave you wondering, what the hell is this? What do I get? What’s going on?

Craig Bond:
No, I absolutely agree. And back to your claim about credibility, where you’re saying it’s the best material. So for instance, let’s say you’re a maker of custom furniture. There’s two very different messages that you could tell. You could say the number one maker of custom furniture in the Vancouver area, but what does the number one maker mean and how do you back up that claim versus having a benefit? Because if you’re speaking to your target audience, if you’re getting custom furniture, it’s obviously going to be people who are well off that can afford the custom furniture. So leading with a benefit driven statement, make your living space yours, customize it your way versus the number one maker of custom furniture in the area. So that is really making it about you, about the business, about the company versus spinning that to the benefit of this is what our customers get. So putting them in that mindset of, oh, this is how it benefits me rather than what the business is.

Sean Corbett:
Or you say unique pieces that’ll have your guests talking for days after they leave.

Craig Bond:
Yeah, absolutely.

Sean Corbett:
Right. You don’t go down to the brick and buy it and everyone has it. So you’re playing on that too. Some people like to show off a little bit. So yeah, it really is about, but that’s a very unique message because you and I don’t care about that. I’m sitting in a room talking to you, people can’t see it, but I’m sitting on a very plain chair with a very, not even a desk, I have a laptop, like a plane thing propping up my laptop, and that kind of messaging would not work on me at all. Now, I’m not a huge consumer and buyer of furniture, so maybe no one has to care about that. But yeah, I’m interested, like you and I were talking about before, I’m interested in natural materials. If something has a synthetic material, I’m completely turned off by it in every way.
So just hitting me with that one feature, that would be a big benefit. Well, that’s funny to say it that way, but just hitting me with that feature would be an impactful message. So I’m going to circle back and we can clarify each of these things at the start, or you were talking about the deco shop and they had this kind of area fairy slogan, and I think why you see that a lot, and you can jump in and correct me if you think I’m wrong one, it’s just because people are nervous about writing, and so they want to get it over as soon as possible. So they hack together some vague thing and it’s like, oh, that sounds aspirational. Let’s go with that. Because they don’t want to commit to anything. People are actually scared to tell you straight up what it is they do and why it’s good.
I mean, it’s very true of most people. The odd person likes to brag, but most normal people are a bit humble and they don’t want to start going into the details. But the other thing is something you and I talk about all the time is people trying to mimic big corporate advertising like a Coca-Cola or any kind of lifestyle brand, Nike, that kind of thing. Just do it. That is the dumbest slogan for anyone but Nike. And it only works if you have Michael Jordan wearing your shoes dominating in basketball for years, after years after years. And then you can say, just do it. Oh, okay, I get it. But what folks aren’t realizing is the Deel store in your example, jumped right to that. Well, no one knows them. No one knows what they do. Maybe they have a reputation, but you certainly didn’t know it.
They don’t have any endorsements, they don’t have whatever, they don’t have big visibility or market penetration. Once you get that visibility and market penetration, you can go beyond storytelling even to that aspirational stuff because you’re working on a different level and for Coke and Nike to talk about drinking and wearing shoes, it’s beneath. It’s not good for the brand, right? Because it commodifies trying to non commodify their brand. So again, just for the listeners’ sake, let’s kind of take people through. I would say it’s increasing complexity. This features as the simplest, you just list what it does. Benefits is a little bit harder. You have to think, okay, well what’s the outcome of what it does for the person who’s getting it? And then story, obviously the most creative, you have to spin a tail. That’s often when you bring in guys like us who are used to doing narratives and setups and payoffs and all this kind of thing, but we’re saying it’s not totally necessary to jump right to story right away. If so, I’ll give people an example for features. If you’re the only local business that does a thing that’s very, that’s obviously on its surface unique and people know what that uniqueness is right away, like a hundred percent cotton T-shirt, people know what that is.
That’s a feature. When these goofballs came in with a gross synthetic material instead it’s sweat wicking and it keeps you cool and stuff. Well, that’s getting more to a benefit because no, you don’t want to say made from gross, reconstituted plastic that doesn’t let your skin breathe, which is what that is. So they had to move up. People did not know at the time what synthetic fibers would do, so they had to come up with a benefit for it. Now, I’m not saying for you folks out there, because Greg, I know you benefit driven marketing. Well, I’m not saying that benefit driven marketing is misleading or whatever, but I’m just saying once if there’s a certain market penetration, and again, to not be a commodity, if everybody has cotton, now you’re just a commodity. Again, you don’t stand out. So now you might have to think of a benefit driven message. I’ll get your input on those and then eventually we’ll move on to the story part. But what do you think about that?

Craig Bond:
Yeah, I mean, you made some really good points all along the way, and first of all, benefit driven messaging shouldn’t be misleading. So it’s a fine balance if you’re misleading your customers, they will see through it immediately. People are very savvy nowadays. So any sort of benefit driven messaging has to be rooted in truth. But if we can look at this maybe at stages of the marketing funnel, so to speak, if you’re talking to somebody who at the top would be awareness, right? So let’s say you are a seller of 100% cotton T-shirts, right? And you’re just trying to get people aware of it, these people might not even know that they would be better off without 10% polyester in their shirt. They don’t even know that they’re just looking for a shirt. So at this stage, a benefit driven message might help clothing that helps you feel healthier or it’s more breathable or leaves your skin feeling smoother or healthier, right? Yeah. Versus let’s say you have some ads set up on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever your target audience happens to be, and you’re targeting people who are in the consideration phase. They already know that they like cotton T-shirts 100%, and that’s all they’re looking for. They’re typing in 100%, buy 100% cotton T-shirts online.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s a good example for when Google ads are so effective because the audience is telling you what they’re looking for. If you’re bidding on those keywords, like you said, they’ve already done a degree of research and I think a lot of small businesses maybe get confused about that. They want to do Facebook or do Google, and they’re not thinking Facebook’s more for discovery, storytelling, discovery benefits. Google’s more like they’re ready to purchase and they have checklist of things they want to look for before they purchase. So all of a sudden, like you said, now you’re going back to features because if you don’t meet their feature requirements, you’re blown out of the water at that point.

Craig Bond:
Well, an example of a story-driven message that you could have on Facebook with regards to that is you have say a short 15 second teaser video, and it’s some guy and he is scratching his shoulder, he’s got an itchy shirt and he looks under his shoulder and he got a bit of a red rash, and that’s telling a story that if you buy our shirts, you can avoid this problem. So it’s sort of a mix between benefit and stories, but it’s really about understanding your target audience. One thing that we talked about in our conversation was like plumbing, right? Let’s say I need a plumber in my area. You don’t really need to have benefit driven messaging or stories for a plumber. I just need somebody to unclog my sink. That’s all I’m looking for. Who’s the nearest plumber at the most reasonable price that can come and unclog my sink? In that case, feature driven messaging would work perfectly fine.

Sean Corbett:
And then of course, as soon as you get, when we used to build websites for Toronto plumbers or Vancouver plumbers, the competition is just so intense, so many of them, and they would start to get into all sorts of crazy tactics with their websites and their lead generation stuff. It got rather sleazy, but my impression is you almost had to do that. The competition was so fierce, but at that level, I would tell the story of the company. So that’s what, look, you and I come from the website world and there’s about pages on websites, and a lot of folks will say, do I need the about page? Should I put my own picture on? I’ll go to about pages on websites. I’m sure you’ve seen this, Craig, and it just says, it just talks in this vague corporate sense. We this, we pride ourselves, we strive to be the best customer service and do this and that.
They don’t have a picture of the owners. They don’t tell how the thing started. And sometimes the story of how it started, Bill’s plumbing started when Bill’s grandfather came over from Greece and they lived in a basement and couldn’t afford anything, and it flooded, and Bill had to figure out how to plumb. That’s an interesting story for people to hear. And then they say, to this day, we’ve always talked about serving families and making homes safer and blah, blah, blah. Well, that’s totally different than the plumbing shop that started a year ago employs people from outside the neighborhood. They come and go. Like I said, it’s a commoditized thing. It’s just about how you market yourself in that regard. And so there’s a good example of a story another pinging off your T-shirt example, Craig, I always want to go to the most extreme stuff as a couple years ago, if you had a T-shirt or jewelry or whatever, we’re talking like a $10. Again, anyone could make it, anyone could order it overseas, but if you got your branded T-shirt worn by say, Taylor Swift at a music reward show, that story is worth its weight and gold,

Craig Bond:
Right? Absolutely. Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Okay, so we’ve given people some examples of each, and what we’re trying to get across to folks is that one is not better than another. It’s picking the right poison for the people you’re talking to at the time. And so I guess what I wanted to do is just try to break it down and say, Craig, you’re not doing this alone. I think a lot of the listeners, maybe they might have themselves and they might have themselves plus one other person to help them. So first we want to show them how a big corporation would do it. You manage different teams of people working on different things. Some are creative, some are research-based, whatever.

Craig Bond:
As

Sean Corbett:
You’re coming up with this messaging, how are you directing your teams of which style of messaging they should use? And then how are you guys testing and figuring out if the message is clear? Because sometimes you’re so close to the product or service, you don’t know what other people don’t know. You don’t know what they’re confused by or what their expectations are. So how do you figure that out, the right message, and then how do you communicate it to get all your team on board to do it?

Craig Bond:
So I mean, there’s a lot to unpack here, but really at a high level, what one of the major functions of product marketing is, and this can apply to anybody, if you’re running your own small business somewhere and you have to do this yourself, you have to really understand your customer. I mean, it really starts by understanding who your target demographic is. Let’s say you’re targeting to people in the a hundred thousand dollars plus income range, 50-year-old male plus versus someone who’s fresh out of university and they’re just getting started with their life and their career. Those are going to be two different customers. So it’s really understanding who your target customer is, because those messages that you’re going to tailor are going to be very different. But essentially as once you understand that, and you should is whether you do this as an official document or at least I just keep track of it somewhere, is have a base messaging document.
What’s the positioning? Where do you fit in the market? There’s templates for that online that you can get all over the place, so just search for it and you can do this exercise where you can write down where you fit in the market. In one sentence, what’s your unique value proposition? What are some market facing headlines that can communicate the value of your product or your service? What are some blocks of copy that you might want to use on landing pages describing your different services? What are the key benefits of your customers and maybe who your competitors are in the area? Because if you are, say you’re Joe’s Plumbing service and you’re competing, sometimes there’s those corporate plumbing services where they’re a big corporation and they offer hot water tank rental and all those different things. That’s a much different and bigger company. And so it’s really understanding who your competitors are and then making sure that you work your differentiators into your core message.
So that’s what I do. I understand the products, our customers, our market landscape, and then how are we going to position ourselves in the market? And then I take that once all that’s crafted, then I communicate it out to the organization so that the sales team is trained so that the lead generation teams are trained so that the creative team is giving us the assets that we need so that our e-commerce teams are trained in that sort of thing. Now, if you’re doing this yourself, that’s going to be a lot to handle, but if you start with that foundational positioning and messaging and understanding what that is and the benefit that you’re giving to your customers, then even if you’re just doing some small ads like Google ads or Facebook ads or business cards or brochures and things like that, all of that can be informed by the foundational messaging doc that you create. So it can be expanded and worked at any size organization, big or small.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s interesting you say that because I think a lot of times people will find those downloads online or they’ll read about something like that and then just say, go homework, that’s a weird exercise, blah, blah, blah. But as you just explained, on a really high international level for selling software, which is a hyper competitive game, you guys don’t skip that exercise. You have that document, and I’m sure that it’s a living document. You keep bringing it up in meetings and quantifying it. And then here’s a little tip for those personality types that are contrarian like me, when I do those exercises, I actually hate those exercises, to be honest with you. I like to keep everything in my head, but I run a very small marketing agency where I work intimately with my clients who are also small. We don’t have a team of a hundred that I have to communicate stuff to.
But for contrarians, like me, I like to also make a list of what we are not and areas where we cannot compete. So for instance, I have a client, he has an incredibly engaging personality type. If you put him in front of a camera and you give some very baseline guidance, and again, maybe it’s easier for you and I, Craig, because we came from that directing filmmaking world, but I put him in front of a camera with some basic guidance. He will ad lib stuff and knock it to the park. He’s very confident, good posture, good voice. He used to be on his debate club when he was younger, and he is confident also in his knowledge and his service. He really does believe and know he has some of the best, it’s high level commercial investing, and he understands risk management. He knows better than most of his peers. However, what his peers do so much better than him is sell a dream, speak inspirationally, talk to people about their own egos and their dreams and stuff like that. And anytime he tries to do that, it just comes off as forced and fake and phony. And I always try to tell him, you can’t compete in that arena. And it bugs him, obviously. He is a very sharp guy. He is like, well, I want to outcompete them on their strengths. Don’t compete with them on their strengths. It’s hard.
Play your game, show your strengths, and you’re not going to sell everybody. You’re going to sell the people who are a good fit for your service in business. And I think you and I didn’t talk about that today, and we will have to wrap this up pretty soon, but the unspoken thing that we’re talking about when we say make these lists, think about your audience. What stage of awareness are they at? People have to accept that they can’t sell everyone, and if you try to fit a square peg in a round hole, meaning you have to feel like you have to trick or manipulate an audience that wouldn’t normally buy from you. I will tell you a hundred percent, and I’m sure you can back this up, Craig, even if you get the sale up front, those are the worst customers. They have the most hassle. They don’t fit in with the ecosystem of the business, and frankly, they don’t refer and they don’t buy again.

Craig Bond:
So you touch on a really important point. It was going to be something I brought up, although it’s a slight departure from our conversation today. I was at a physiotherapist recently, and I remember, and then before that I was at a chiropractor, so I was just having some neck work done. So she was working with me and she was the nicest lady, and I remember thinking, this is a great physiotherapist office. Then we started talking somehow about Google reviews and she goes, oh, I don’t even know how to do that. Wouldn’t even know how to do that. I’ve got three Google reviews, but I’m thinking, this is a really good physiotherapist office. She’s very professional. She knows what she’s doing. The office is modern and clean. The receptionist is fantastic. I would easily give this a five star review. So I suggested to her, I’m like, why don’t you just ask each of your customers that comes in like, Hey, if you mind doing us a favor and leaving us a Google review if you’ve had a good experience.
And I think she took it to heart because I noticed, and the reason I had that idea is the chiropractor had done that to me, and what did I do? I went and left them. Good review. And so I suggested that to her, and I don’t know, I’m pretty sure her review count has gone up since then. But the point is, it’s all about having a good and healthy online presence in today’s world and healthy reviews, because the opposite is also true. If you have the wrong type of customer, they’re going to go and leave you a one star review and three or four of those can destroy a small business. So you really have to nurture those customers and really try to build up your online presence in that regard.

Sean Corbett:
Craig, that’s a really interesting way to look at things. Just to wrap up the conversation for everybody, if I could give folks one mind hack, I suppose, or one way to do this process to come up with clear messaging, it’s to envision the end result of a satisfied customer who goes out and tells 10 other people about you, leaves you that good review, appreciates the service, likes what you’re doing for them has a long-term relationship with you. That’s what the messaging you’re coming up with, even on those first touches for people who are totally unaware, eventually, that’s what the messaging should lead to. So when you’re brainstorming your messaging coming up with your documents, you should have those ideal customers in mind at the end of the process, the ones who would leave the good review, and like you say, yes, it’s a very good point. You have to make things easy on customers every step of the way. So again, a clear and effective way to get more reviews is literally just to ask for them and tell people where you want them to leave the review. Nowadays, there’s a million places, right? And I’m sure, would you say it was a chiro and a massage therapist?

Craig Bond:
Physio. Physio,

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. Chiro and physio, whichever one actually had that ask ready. I assume they also had a QR code or a link or something. They would take you right to their review page as well.

Craig Bond:
They didn’t, but they have 200 reviews versus three at the physio place, right?

Sean Corbett:
There you go. But yeah, so if I wanted to get more reviews, I’d also make it stupid simple on the people. Once I asked them, I’d give them a scan, QR code or a link or something, and then that way they’re not fighting to figure out where to go.

Craig Bond:
Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
But anyway, man, last word goes to you. Do you want to wrap the subject up? Anything that we missed that you’d like to say based on your experience or any specific campaigns you did to give an example of how this kind of stuff works?

Craig Bond:
Yeah. Not too much additional that we didn’t already cover, but I do want to just say how important it is to really be laser focused on that message. You don’t always have to be the most creative. Sometimes it just pays, to tell things in plain language. One example is a financial services company that I went to recently, and I wasn’t sure what they were selling because I went on and it was kind of a closeup on a hiking boot going up the side of a mountain, and you can achieve freedom too or something. I don’t remember what the message was, and I didn’t know if they were trying to sell me hiking boots or whether they were trying to sell me financial services. And so I think just being cognizant of that, right? Always think from the perspective of a customer. If you are a customer visiting your webpage or you are a customer, looking at your business card, is the message — you have one chance to tell the customer what your service is and potentially why it can benefit them and possibly why it’s better than other people. But at the very least, they need to understand in just one sentence or less, or preferably a tagline, what your service is, waffles and wifi. It could be that simple, right? I know exactly what it is and where it fits. So just be cognizant of that when you’re crafting the messages and always look at it from the perspective of your customer.

Sean Corbett:
Beautiful. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on here today. Always good chatting.

Craig Bond:
I appreciate it. Thanks, Sean. Take care.