More (of the right) Leads – Websites.ca Talk Ep. 41

Sean Corbett:
Hello everybody. Sean Corbett here, Websites.ca Marketing. Today I’m joined by a special guest and my friend, Josh, he’s a programmer, he’s a marketer, he has many hats. And he runs an agency called Revere Technologies. He’s going to crack open his brain and let you behind the scenes of basically how to get leads online, how to build your business, and how to think about the web a little bit differently. So Josh, thanks for being here today.

Josh Blais:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Sean Corbett:
So we were talking before the podcast and I was saying, are you 50, 50 programmer, marketer? What’s your background? And you had kind of an interesting answer, so I suppose we’ll lead with that.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I started in the real estate world, actually. Not unlike yourself, I believe.

Sean Corbett:
I did mortgage broker for about a year leading up to the crash. Yeah, perfect timing.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, perfect timing. No kidding, hey. I actually started in 16, so I’m a few years removed from that. But yeah, I started as a residential real estate agent. And as anybody knows in the real estate world, your prospects in the first couple years are not tremendous. You’re a self-starter, have to generate all of your own business yourself. So while I was selling zero homes in my first six months, I was like, what can I do to generate more business?
And that’s where I started really learning about the online world, marketing, advertising, everything. So it was kind of in that drought of real estate business that came about my interest and love of advertising, marketing and what led into web development and programming. I laugh because before we started this podcast, it was like, “What is your title?” And I’m like, “I don’t even know what my title is.”

Sean Corbett:
Well, when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to figure things out, like you said, especially in a new industry where it’s so reliant on network. You almost have to just pick a lane to specialize in and go super deep on that and see where it brings you out. And I guess you decided to do online lead generation, right?

Josh Blais:
Yep, that would be … I would say that would be the … if we want to pinpoint, that would be for sure the market that I was looking to fulfill.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. So what is it like practically 99% online? Or were you still doing a lot of hustling in person and trying to do both offline and online too? At that point.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, the interesting thing was we started with … I started on a team and the team was like, “Okay, we’re going to generate these really shitty online leads for you. And we’re going to essentially put these in a CRM and you’re going to call these people and bug the hell out to them.” And I was like, “Okay, I mean, that seems to be the way that all real estate agents are doing this.” So I did it for about two weeks and I was like, “Wow, these people really don’t want to talk to me.”
And I was like, “Okay, why don’t they want to talk to me?” And it was because the lead funnel that we were using, it was a locked off website so that people could see listings. So we’re just asking people for their email and phone number on this website, and they’re giving it to us so that they get access to this website, but they don’t want to be contacted. And there may be one in thirty, one in forty that was like, “Oh, thanks for reaching out. Maybe in six months, maybe a year I’ll be interested in buying a house or something like that.” Yeah, you follow-up with those people. But the amount of F offs and stuff you receive is very high.
So I was like, okay, interesting. This is not working the way that I would hope it would. So why don’t I change the lead funnel? Why don’t I make a website for my business and be like, we want to provide you with a home evaluation. So the people that are actually coming in the door are wanting the information that I’m wanting to give them. Changed overnight, right then and there. Because the people that were contacting us, 90% of them were like, “I want to sell a house.” And I’m like, “Awesome.”
So I mean, it was simply changing the offer and leaving the team that I had originally started on, hating my life, moving to a different place and actually having some control. So from there I was like, okay, how do we make this offer better? How do we ramp up advertising, keywords, negative keywords, all this stuff? And I’m like, okay, well, I’m essentially a marketer now on top of a realtor. And from there, it just was like, okay, I want more control.
So two years later, in Alberta to get your real estate broker’s license, you can do it after two years of being in the industry. So I was like, okay, that’s what I want to do because I want to generate leads for agents and grow this and make a business out of it. Whereas a lot of realtors are kind of more … they’re the face of the business, they are the whole thing, and we know where that ends up sometimes. So I was like, okay, how do I scale this? And that’s kind of my background into internet advertising and all of that.
It was trying a lot of things, but also realizing that it’s really your offer and how you’re really creating these ads, writing these ads, the copywriting, that gets people in the door. And then it also filters them out and adds people to that list that are able to be contacted and you can help out, at the end of the day.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, they’re putting up their hands, obviously, in the signaling in a lot different way than the leads you were originally working with. But I think … so there’s a lot to unpack there. The big realization, I think, and feel free to disagree, obviously. The big realization is I’m not a real estate agent and I don’t work for someone else. I’m actually a marketer who markets real estate and I’m going to have to work for myself, whether or not I want to. Would probably be the big mental turning point, right?

Josh Blais:
That was exactly the mental turning point. It was like, I can sell this many houses per year and make X amount of income. Or I can help a lot more people sell a lot more houses and then make a percentage off of that. And it’s like, well, now I’m a marketer, I’m not actually a real estate agent. I’m a business owner, I’m an entrepreneur.

Sean Corbett:
And you went from sort of a person and then you get into real estate, you suddenly become a commodity, really, because there’s so many … it’s not that hard to enter. The barrier to entry is pretty low. And then so how do you differentiate yourself? But then suddenly you go back from being a commodity to a unique offer again, because now you’re getting the real estate agents to come to you for the one pain point they have, that no one else-

Josh Blais:
Exactly.

Sean Corbett:
Could solve for them.
So then the other two things I wanted to hit on that are really interesting, and what you said are … and I see this a lot with a lot of clients, and not just on Websites.ca. But I do marketing, obviously, for people outside the Websites.ca ecosystem. And every niche or industry or whatever you want to call it, brings with it a series of secular beliefs.
For instance, we’ve always done things that way, or that’s what everyone does. And I’m sure you found the same thing, people get really upset when you suggest otherwise. So if you’re saying like, look, the leads are trash. Oh, well look at the new guy complaining again. We all have to go through it, buddy. We got to cold call everybody. And say, well, maybe I don’t have to, though. So there’s that secular belief thing that if you can overcome it, even for the listeners like in your own business, let’s try to think of one thing you do because everyone else does that really … it sucks and it doesn’t work and stop doing it.
That’s a great actionable thought. But can you just clarify for me, I would assume when you change the focus of the leads, obviously the sellers are way more qualified. But I would imagine there’s way less people at any given time wanting to sell a house than there are people just browsing listings online. Or is that not correct?

Josh Blais:
No, that’s absolutely correct. And I think that what I did was change the funnel. So I changed it to really target people that actually wanted me right here, right now. As opposed to people that were potentially browsing. But here’s the thing in real estate is like people want to see $2 million houses. Are they actually qualified to buy a $2 million house? Nope, not all of them. As a percentage, not a very high percentage.
So, what you’re doing is also filtering out tire kickers and people that aren’t actually really interested in the business of buying or selling real estate. And you filter them down to, oh, I actually want to sell my house. And then from there, you actually open up a funnel to purchasing real estate too, because if somebody’s selling their house, three months down the road when their house sells, they probably want to buy another one. Or they need to upsize or they need to downsize, or how you get in is by initially selling their house and then, oh, hey Josh, you did a really good job. Help me purchase, help do these other things or help my friend, or all these … you almost build a funnel just based on that too.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to maximize your leads, of course. You want to touch them as many times as possible in their life cycle. So, for sure. It kind of incentivizes you and your team to give great customer service at that point because you work so hard to get the lead.

Josh Blais:
Oh, for sure. You work tremendously hard to get that lead, and then it’s keeping them in the pipeline for the lifetime of that client. Hopefully they come back again and again, or they send you to their friends or you know how it is.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the friends and family thing. Because I know we were talking before about the wideness of funnels or how wide you’re targeting. So to clarify for the audience, he switched his focus on a different kind of lead. But I’ve never gotten the feeling from you, Josh, that you’re too worried about having a wide mouth at the front of your funnel and you can fill in the color. But basically the punchline was you were telling me, you might get a lead of someone who … the person themselves might not be the buyer or seller of a home or whatever vertical you’re in. But just them knowing about you and you being cool with them when they become a lead, they probably have family, friends who are qualified and they end up referring them to you even if they don’t become buyers, is that right?

Josh Blais:
Absolutely. I think that what happened was when we changed the quality of the lead that came in and showed them that we could actually help them, you also showed them that you can help their friends or their family or whatever.
So your net is very wide, but people discount word of mouth marketing today in the world of the internet and instant replies and such. Where those word of mouth people are worth a tremendous amount. It’s intangible, really, how much these people are worth to you in the long term. And I think that a lot of people are discounting that wide net, that only gets wider as people see what you’re doing and how you can help people.

Sean Corbett:
As long as you have a bit of patience and a bit of a time horizon, then it might not be instant.

Josh Blais:
Well, time horizon in this business was years, potentially.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, right, right. Okay. So then let’s talk maybe about some of the unforeseen hurdles that you encountered. And I thought it was interesting to bring you on because often either we talk to business owners who feel like they have to hire someone like you. And then on the podcast, I bring on a lot of vendors, let’s say, contractors, who do marketing like you. But you were both the marketer and the business owner at the same time. So I’m thinking-

Josh Blais:
Yes.

Sean Corbett:
You must have hit some hurdles, you can’t … first of all, you can’t slough the blame off on a vendor and say, well, that guy’s an idiot, I’m going to fire him. But then also, you have to have, like we’re talking about, a longer time horizon. Like okay, well if it didn’t work on the first try, I’m not going to fire myself, so what am I going to do to fix it? Maybe you could identify one or two of those big hurdles in how you actually finally overcame them.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, so I mean, I think the first hurdle would have been the learning process and the learning curve of the advertising. And then also, learning everything that goes along with it. So there’s negative keywords, there’s retargeting, there’s all these different things that you can do to really see how a campaign is working.
So I think the first thing that I did was just throw money at a campaign and just hope that things came back to me. When things didn’t, you have to be like, well, what am I doing wrong? Where can I actually improve here? So the first thing that you can do is look at how do I make this campaign stronger? How do I change the keyword structure? How do I do these different things in the campaign that could raise the quality of the campaign to something that actually is successful in returning on investment?

Sean Corbett:
But you had a unique ability as a marketer because being from the real estate space yourself, you had a keener insight into what the people might be searching. Sometimes marketers come in totally blind and they’re just guessing.

Josh Blais:
Absolutely.

Sean Corbett:
And the person who hires them and said, “Well, I hired you, you do the job. I don’t have time.” No, no, please get on the phone. Tell me, are people searching for this or this? And a lot of times business owners would just go, well, I don’t know, both, neither, I don’t care, do your job. And they don’t realize that we kind of need that, like you said, negative keywords. For people who don’t know, is there’s terms for people who search. But then Google’s casting a wider net, as well. So they’re bringing you in all these other folks who might not be qualified, and you as the marketer have to go in and say, well, if they search for my main keyword, but they added this extra descriptive keyword, I don’t want them in. So that would be a negative keyword, it filters them out, is what he’s saying.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, a little bit of lingo there. But yeah, exactly. And I think that the thing that you come to learn, too, is these platforms that you’re using, they’re designed to spend your money. So your intent is to get leads in or to sell product or service, but the intent of the platform is to get you to spend your money. So what you actually have to do is take that wide net, that platform’s casting, wider than I would like to cast, to talk about what we were talking about previously. But you want to take that super wide net and actually bring it back down to earth to something that you really want to target.
So for example, in the real estate industry, people are looking at rentals, for example. Well, I’m not actually interested in helping or looking at rentals right now. So I don’t want to be targeting anybody that’s looking for a rental property or they’re looking to rent something tomorrow. Because that’s a huge, huge market in the real estate world, is people that are actually looking to rent, not purchase. So you have to take that funnel and make it much more narrow to alleviate the searches that are coming in from people that are wanting to rent. Were I a property manager, I would be looking for those people. But I’m not.
So I think that that was a big turning point for me was I was spending a lot of money, and then I was like, oh, well, the quality is so much wider than I really want. I only really want to be targeting 25, 30 keywords where it’s targeting hundreds. And I’m like, oh, well, these are not actually relevant to the people that I’m looking to help.

Sean Corbett:
And then of course, it’s costing more money and getting a lot more junk and so on. You definitely focus on the start of the funnel with the advertising. And now I’ve read tons of stuff online that’ll say, once you have a customer list, once you really have your demographics narrowed down, that you could target super, super close in on the person and focus on, say, conversions or sales or whatever. But like you said, the way a lot of the ad platforms are set up is they’re set up to spend your money as fast as possible. So if you tell it what you want, it’s going to take you at a cartoonish version of your word and go crazy spending your money.
Was there ever an instance where you started having different funnels set up where you got extremely granular down the line, once you had done this for a long time? Or do you really just prefer to get as many semi qualified people in as you can and do your filtering than person to person or within your agency, rather than on ad platforms? In other words, what I’m saying is like are you looking for a conversion that’s further off from the final sale always? Or were you ever doing ads that were right next to the final conversion point for the customer?

Josh Blais:
That’s a great question. It’s super relevant, I think, for what I’m doing currently. You cast a really wide net, but as you fine tune and filter and get down to what you actually are looking for, you start finding something called long tail keywords. And I’m sure you’re aware of that and your audiences, too. Where you are targeting a keyword that probably nobody else in the world is targeting. It is so granular, rather, so specific that I would hazard to guess that about 25% of the actual keywords that I begin targeting on a campaign after running for three, six months is so specific that I don’t really think anybody else in the world is targeting it.
So you learn about your audience and you start bringing it down to people are looking for this much specifics, let’s write a keyword for that and let’s start targeting for it. And you pay next to $0 for these keywords because they’re not competitive. They’re not something like real estate agent, they are much more specific. And all of a sudden your campaign goes from a ROI of maybe five times to an ROI of 30 times.

Sean Corbett:
So you can basically historically look at all your leads and look at how they came in, which keywords they searched, to originally see your ad and click on it. And then you’re just looking for patterns from there.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, exactly. And I think that the world of SEO, it’s not dead. But I think it is kind of dying now that you have all these artificial intelligence programs that are writing SEO. But when you target a long tail keyword in an advertising campaign, you’re put at the top. And it’s something that is so specific that people are like, how did this even know that I was looking for this? They click on it immediately, they come into your funnel and you’re like, oh, well, I’m what you’re looking for, right?

Sean Corbett:
Oh, man, I’m so glad you brought up SEO because I absolutely wanted to swerve in that direction as soon as you said that. Some of my background as a writer originally was in keyword research for organic search. And so somebody like you came to me and they said, I’ve been spending all this money doing ads and I’ve identified two or three long tail keywords. Like you say, right, almost no one else in the industry is targeting. All I’m thinking right away when you’re saying that is, well man, I’ll build a landing page in a day and we’ll get all that money for free. You’ll be the first result because you’re paying for the ad, but I’ll be the first organic result right underneath you. Would that be stupid, would you say? Now with the current climate, like you said, with unlimited articles being written. Or would you want to do both or switch just to the unpaid SEO landing page?

Josh Blais:
Yeah, I think if it’s such a specific keyword, you can eventually go to that completely organic traffic. I think that it’s just such a challenge nowadays. And I know that you’re super familiar with this, that the artificial intelligence programs that be ChatGPT, [inaudible], et cetera. Are capable of writing these specific articles that are tailored to something that is a keyword that people are searching for. And I think that you have almost a more competitive market nowadays for that organic traffic, than you do for an advertising campaign.
I don’t say that lightly. It’s almost turning the market and the industry on its head in that you have these floodings of articles now. Whereas if you just advertise, you’re put in a defacto, top of the list, and people come in the door because you’re paying not a tremendous amount of money for it either.

Sean Corbett:
That’s interesting. No, that’s an interesting angle. When I look at SEO, I have noticed, and as I’m sure you have, as well. At any time I want to look up a hobby based question for the last two or three years, I get a carbon copy version of articles I used to write five, six years ago. Where it has to start with a headline that’s a question, that it’s got a table of contents. The table of content says half of them are other questions that are searched a lot, and then other keyword stuff. And then it says long article, you got to scroll through the whole damn thing to try to find your answer halfway down. And people are probably getting sick of that. Whereas the ads and the landing pages, they’re going to from the ads are probably just getting right to the heart of their question.

Josh Blais:
Exactly.

Sean Corbett:
So what I’m thinking, if you’re an SEO guy doing organic stuff or blogger even. I think you’ve got to go in the opposite direction and go, some guys I’ve seen who are successful, they go super deep. Their articles are like mini essays, and a lot of them are based on experiments and results, as opposed to pure info. So they’re not saying, I’ll teach you how to do SEO. Let’s say there’s an article about SEO, right? I’ll teach you how to do SEO. What they’re saying is, I did these 10 experiments for SEO over the last year, here’s my results, here’s a graph we had our graphic designer create. And that it’s almost like if you want to get traffic from blogging, you have to even go further out on the funnel, which is like, I’m just going to give you this massive library of amazing things and make you trust me to get you into my ecosystem.

Josh Blais:
Yeah, I would wholeheartedly agree with that. I write blogs, personally, and I almost just never even think about keyword targeting them anymore. I think of just writing articles and throwing them out into the ether. And somehow, they find people that are looking for things that I’m saying. But also I figure that if I were writing articles for the goal of SEO, the sad part is you almost have to become so mechanized in the way that you’re writing these articles, that it becomes a displeasure to write these articles.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, yeah, no, totally. Again, I keep saying this on this podcast and in person. It’s robots talking to robots. So if you want to do well with the Google algorithm, you’ve got to get the ChatGPT robot to talk to it. And then like you said, it sounds trite to people who are listening, right? But I want to put a fine point on this is, you do ads for a specific purpose. But then if you’re going to blog, reading between the lines of what you said, Josh, is what I’ve been saying for 15 years. Just if you’re a business, just blog. Imagine that you’re blogging for a specific customer, who asked a specific question. Or a staff member who asked a specific question. Just solve that problem. Because chances are, if someone’s asking for that once, someone else is going to ask for it again in the future. Don’t worry about SEO, don’t worry about traffic. Fix a problem in your business right now with the blog article. I’ll bet you that will become an asset you can use in the future.

Josh Blais:
I’ll even add to that, and I think that a blog article is now showing the people that you’re human behind the business. So what actually a blog article is a relationship. It becomes the beginning of a relationship, it gets people in the door, and then there’s like, oh, Josh is a real person. Josh likes this thing or likes this thing. I can relate to that, maybe I’ll use him for this service. And every single business can benefit based on that, because they’re like, well, there’s always a person behind a business. And that’s almost-

Sean Corbett:
Dude, I can tell you exactly, that had just happened with you. I recommended your service to somebody, and before they made the final decision to hire … because they told me. Before they made the final decision to hire you, they went to your website, they read two to three blogs. And I’m not joking, they picked one thing from one blog and they’re like, “Oh, I liked his monitor set up. It shows he’s serious.”
So when you wrote that article, you probably had a serial killer, you had a corkboard. And you’re like, I’m going to put what monitor I have because that’s going to attract a client-

Josh Blais:
Exactly.

Sean Corbett:
But obviously, you didn’t.

Josh Blais:
No. And I think that that’s truly what a blog becomes now in 2023, is you’re going back to touching people emotionally. You’re touching people in relationships, you’re becoming relatable. And I think that if you write blog posts in that regard, as opposed to mechanically being like, I need this keyword in here 25 times so that I rank. I don’t know, like I can’t really help you. That’s personally my thought, at least on the blogging side of things.

Sean Corbett:
And in a sea of robots, the human connection will always stand out. So it’s a sweet edge.

Josh Blais:
Very much so.

Sean Corbett:
Now we sort the way obviously, and we probably should wrap it up soon, so I wanted to give you the final word, but we can come back to that topic of ads and targeting leads and so on, because you have done this for a long time. We will tell the folks how to find you, if they want some help with that type of thing. But yeah, do you have any final thoughts as pertains to online lead generation in 2023?

Josh Blais:
I think it truly is, like if you want to run advertising, it should be targeted to the people that want to use your services right here, right now. But I think that on top of that advertising, what you can do is really become relatable. And there’s blogging, but I do think that one of the biggest things you can do nowadays is turn on your camera and talk to a camera. And just show people who you actually are. Talk about whatever esoteric ideas you have, talk about just everything that you’re going through in the process of building a business even. I think that all of these things are tremendously valuable in showing people that you’re a person behind the business.
Because I think that’s what people are really looking for nowadays, is that they’re looking for that relatability, they’re looking for that person, they’re looking to feel like they’re a friend of the business owner. And I think that the people that actually do that are the most successful because people just keep coming back to you, after they build a relationship with you. There really is no more like, I need to spend $5 to acquire this lead, and now I need to nurture this lead. It’s thinking in terms of becoming more than that.
And when you look at it from that perspective, your lead generation really goes to zero because all of a sudden you do a good job for one person, they like who you are, they like what you’re doing. All of a sudden, oh, my friend who also relates to me in some way and you, wants to use your business, here he is. Introduction, go from there. I think that that really is the long-term goal of this sort of thing, is that advertising is this wide net, but when you get down to the actual relationship. If you can build that relationship and nurture it and create something that’s lasting, you’re not going to need advertising 10 years down the road.

Sean Corbett:
Yep, long-term planning. Josh, if people want to pick your brain more on this and get some help and maybe commission Revere to help them with their online ads, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Josh Blais:
You can read my blog just like this person that we know, who we’re talking about did, at JoshBlais.com. Or you can go to RevereImaginative.com and just shoot me a message on there and I can talk to you about advertising, marketing, all things programming.

Sean Corbett:
Awesome. Thanks, Josh.

Josh Blais:
Yeah. Talk to you soon.