Knowhow Marketing Lab

[00:00:00] Introduction to Website Security

[00:01:03] The importance of updates for WordPress, themes, and plugins

[00:02:29] Advanced security options: URL changes and security plugins

[00:06:14] Implementing two-factor authentication and strong passwords

[00:09:57] Updating PHP and the importance of SSL certificates

[00:18:38] Security considerations for e-commerce

[00:24:27] Regular backups and managing them effectively

[00:00:00] Speaker: Time for Geek Speak. And this today we are talking about website security obviously we're going to be talking a lot about WordPress because it's generally one that while it's very open, it also means that it's more open to vulnerabilities and other issues. But I think a lot of the principles that we're going to talk about today with WordPress is going to transcend to pretty much whatever platform you're on.

[00:00:25] Speaker: And, but yeah, WordPress is is a good one to use as a jumping off point. Anyway, [00:00:30] my name is Phelan at Seymour digital media.

[00:00:32] Speaker 2: And I'm Greg McKinnon with Original72 Creative.

[00:00:36] Speaker: I think once a year, we're pretty much talking about this cause there's always different parts of security.

[00:00:41] Speaker: And it's one that I know you and I have run into with clients. There's always some sort of security issue with some client. And I would say the first place to get started with that, talking about that is the making sure your plugins are up to date. I think that is a big one that tackles like a lot of [00:01:00] the issues that you're going to run into.

[00:01:03] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty much I would say 85 to 90%, maybe even higher. that someone gets hacks your site or is able to get in through some vulnerability by un patched theme or plugin or WordPress itself. Top of the list obviously is to keep your [00:01:30] WordPress up to date, keep your themes up to date and keep your plugins up to date if you do that simple process.

[00:01:37] Speaker 2: You will be doing yourself a big favor by keeping yourself already at that 90 percent safety level, just in that simple process.

[00:01:48] Speaker: Oh yeah, I absolutely like most of because most people that do have a website like you're not going to be individually targeted, which is a much more difficult situation to be in is if a person is going [00:02:00] after your website specifically, like that's a much tougher has many different aspects that you have to deal with.

[00:02:05] Speaker: But most people, they're just one URL on a big Spreadsheet that the hackers are just trying to go your domain slash WP at login or admin to just try to like, see if your WordPress website, that's the first one. So most people, it's just, you're just getting swept up in a net. And most of those attacks can be solved by just keeping your plugins up to date.

[00:02:29] Speaker: If you want to get, [00:02:30] fancier, you could do something like the, get the word fence. And I, we have certain clients that they've changed the The WP login to some other some other name just so that, if they go sweep through, they just get counted as not being WordPress and so they get left alone.

[00:02:46] Speaker 2: And yeah, that is definitely a good one. I don't do it on a lot of sites because I find people get really tripped up on like, where do I go? Even though it's just go here. Like you [00:03:00] everybody. Everybody in the world just knows to go to WP dash admin. And when you change that on someone, they, for some reason really get tripped up over it.

[00:03:09] Speaker 2: Yeah. So I get questions all the time with people like that. What was my login again? So I have to tell them over and over again, like, why can't you just bookmark this, please? It's not difficult.

[00:03:22] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely one. Yeah. Clients get really weird if you change a little bit in their user flow that they just. Fritz out and just [00:03:30] have the

[00:03:30] Speaker 2: other thing. Along with changing the default login, which is highly recommended because then, because that's like every person trying to get into a WordPress site knows the admin is that WP dash admin. So you type that after your domain, you'll find it. So if you eliminate that, that's huge.

[00:03:49] Speaker 2: The other thing is changing the default admin. user that gets created in in WordPress, because probably [00:04:00] first or second after, the finding the login is them trying the default admin user that typically always gets created for a WordPress site. So eliminating that as well will will help with people just trying Find that and try to, brute force a password to get access to your site.

[00:04:26] Speaker: And that also leads me to another one. It's like having [00:04:30] a word, like WordFence, a plugin or something like that, that limits the number of attempts that people can make before there's a lockout. I know there's some hosting like we have some clients on flywheel, which is part of WP engine And so they by default limit the number of times you can try which also helps with those brute force attacks where they're just basically like slamming it a million times and If you just say three times and then you're locked out, it goes a long way.

[00:04:54] Speaker 2: There's a really good plugin for WordPress that does just that. If you don't [00:05:00] have a security plugin, like we might get into in a little bit specific to doing a bunch of these things. There's one called Limit Login Attempts, and that will basically take care of the amount of times that people are able to attempt to log in and ban them if they go over that.

[00:05:20] Speaker 2: So yeah, if you have nothing else, at least use that, but they're in the other plugins that we get into [00:05:30] for more heavy duty security, they have all of these things and that's one of them, but limit login attempts is just for that.

[00:05:38] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely one I've seen on a couple of our clients websites and super helpful especially if they do run into like people brute forcing and, you It's just going to save you so much headache in the long run.

[00:05:54] Speaker: It's to do these kind of basic setups that just. Break down what people are [00:06:00] doing. Another one I wanted to talk about, we talked about in our prep was making, if you can set up two factor authentication, do set it up. It can be a bit annoying, but annoying things mean that it's harder for hackers to get around them.

[00:06:14] Speaker: or people trying to take advantage of your website. That little bit of inconvenience for you is a big inconvenience for them. And also if you can do it with an app on your phone as the authentication do that. Google has a really good one, Google Authenticator. I use it for [00:06:30] all my major, any of the really critical systems definitely have it that set up that way.

[00:06:35] Speaker: Those are really, they're nigh impossible to break because basically you would need to break into Google. Oh, which actually reminds me, Google is the only one of the major tech companies that never has had a hack. It's a weird, fun fact about theirs and it's because everyone that works there has to carry a physical like USB.

[00:06:55] Speaker: And so you have to plug that into the computer you're working on and then log in from that [00:07:00] computer and you need both of the, both your login and that physical dongle and you can't, and it's not the same as an RFID, so you can't scan it because that's how other people do it like companies will have people physically break into the building by finding out where people go for lunch, sitting next to them, scan their card, key card that's just hanging there, and then break into the building physically that way.

[00:07:21] Speaker: And so there's yeah. But you can't do that with a USB keyboard. Key. So it's

[00:07:25] Speaker 2: yeah. I wonder how many headaches they have every day. People, I lost my [00:07:30] dongle.

[00:07:30] Speaker: Oh yeah, no, absolutely. There's probably yeah. Annoying for them, but secure. Yeah, exactly. Like when you have a track record, like they do that, you can say yes, this is annoying, but look at our track record.

[00:07:43] Speaker: And then. It shuts everyone up to the security risks. But yeah, it's definitely a two factor authentication strongly could not recommend more

[00:07:52] Speaker 2: yeah, for sure. Two factor authentication as well as enabling hardened passwords. So people can't [00:08:00] use the password, for instance, yeah.

[00:08:02] Speaker 2: It has to require an uppercase, a lowercase, a digit a symbol, and it has to be a certain length, that as well I was saying off the top, like the things that we've gone over, you've already gotten to probably 98 percent security of your WordPress site just by doing, and they're not difficult things to do.

[00:08:23] Speaker 2: There's really no excuse for people not to do these things. I did want to [00:08:30] mention outside of WordPress and the software and updating the themes and things it's also really important to make sure that your PHP would be up to date to, the most recommended version if you're running outdated PHP.

[00:08:48] Speaker 2: Versions of PHP. There could also be exploits. Just from that, outside of getting in through your WordPress site there would be other ways that you might be exploited. [00:09:00]

[00:09:00] Speaker: I would even go further than there could be vulnerabilities. There will be vulnerabilities if you have. Yeah, there will be, yeah, for sure.

[00:09:09] Speaker: And I only joke about that because PHP is notoriously a language that is both very simple to learn and very simple to hack. It's it's got

[00:09:17] Speaker 2: the reason why I said it the way I did it was because you could be on not the current version and have had a security update done to it. It's only out of [00:09:30] life, PHP versions.

[00:09:32] Speaker 2: That wouldn't be getting these security updates. So once your PHP version is out of life, at least make sure you're, at a version that is still being maintained and updated. Versus being on the bleeding edge or the current version. Just make sure you're on a version that is not out of life and not getting any up security updates anymore.

[00:09:57] Speaker: No, I totally agree with you. I was just being a little, [00:10:00] reminding people that PHP, while it's very useful as a coding language, it's also very vulnerable and has a lot of well known security issues that it has to deal with as like just coding language in general. So it's definitely one that.

[00:10:15] Speaker: That's why there's so many updates for it is cause that, yeah, it, it really likes telling the world what your database says. Like it's quite insistent on sql injections if you let it [00:10:30] Yeah

[00:10:31] Speaker 2: So on top of all of those basic things that do get you to that high level. There are other smaller things To get you the rest of the way and typically these things are easiestly easiest to be done through A security plugin.

[00:10:49] Speaker 2: The two security plugins that there's one that I use, but there's two that are at the forefront of what people use for security. The one I use is a solid [00:11:00] security. Formerly called iThemes security. They've re iThemes rebranded to solid. So now all of their products are solid security, solid backups, solid central, all these kinds of things.

[00:11:14] Speaker 2: The second one is a word front word fence which is I think probably the most used because solid security is a. There's a free and a paid, but I think WordFence is probably the [00:11:30] best known and most used.

[00:11:33] Speaker: I think when I looked it up, it was like the most installed of any of the security plugins.

[00:11:38] Speaker: Yeah. It's yeah, it's really well known. It's definitely has a lot of. Even if you just have the free tier, it still does a lot, just like without activating the license. So it's well worth it to just install.

[00:11:50] Speaker 2: Yeah. So again, both of them have free, both of them have pro paid versions, but oftentimes the free version.

[00:11:59] Speaker 2: [00:12:00] Does probably up to 99 percent of what you might need. And some of the things that you're going to find in these security plugins are basically an easy way to do and set up a lot of the things we've already talked about, hiding the WP admin at a different address setting so that all of your passwords need to be difficult doing the two factor, basically everything we've gone over.

[00:12:26] Speaker 2: They all will allow you to set them up very [00:12:30] easily. Some of the additional things that you can do in there, which I would recommend are disabling the XML RPC protocol. If you're not going to use that, then you might as well just disable it. And most people don't use it. Another thing

[00:12:50] Speaker: is Just a quick what, which one is the XML RPC?

[00:12:54] Speaker: What, when would people be using that? Just so we're clear for that.

[00:12:58] Speaker 2: Yeah, basically it's a [00:13:00] protocol that will extend and allow for third party connections to your site so that, so you'd be able to use maybe some interface on your phone to connect to WordPress and do things. It's used for. Hooks oftentimes like for pulling real time shipping rates from a shipping provider, if you're running WooCommerce they [00:13:30] will have hooks and the XMLRPC allows for the connection to your site to be able to, inject the information for that third party software.

[00:13:41] Speaker 2: So that's the function that has.

[00:13:45] Speaker: Yeah. Okay. I just, I wanted just to clarify it just so that people, in the audience, if they're like, do I know if I need to do this or not? Yes or no. Yeah, for sure.

[00:13:55] Speaker 2: You could disable it. And if something you're trying to do on your site, all of [00:14:00] a sudden isn't available anymore, you can disable it.

[00:14:05] Speaker 2: But for the most part, if you have just a basic WordPress site, brochure site you can disable it. And you, most people don't need it. It's a, it's, it is a more advanced thing for more complex sites. Yeah. Makes sense. Something else that it does very easily is it will harden and take away the ability [00:14:30] to access files or write to files like your WP config.

[00:14:35] Speaker 2: So you can secure essential files that often get exploited. So that can't happen. I don't know how many people know. Or notice this, but there is a way in WordPress. If you get access to WordPress, you can go and. Look at the theme files and actually change the theme files right within [00:15:00] an editor in the admin.

[00:15:02] Speaker 2: And often times that is a highly suggested item to disable. So both of these security plugins have check boxes and sections like you want to secure this. Do you want to secure that? Check this off, check that off. And these are a lot of those things that it goes through and takes away the ability To be used.

[00:15:25] Speaker: I will say that I use that editor feature a fair bit for some of my clients that have we've [00:15:30] got a custom coded theme and I put my head in my hands and go. Great. It's the editor to just quickly look over the files, but yeah, definitely.

[00:15:38] Speaker 2: It's so dangerous because you make one typo.

[00:15:43] Speaker 2: Like for coding typo in a file and save it and you could, the site could be down and now assuming that most people do that because they don't have FTP access to the server files or something [00:16:00] along those lines. If that happens, all of a sudden you're like, Oh, it's down. And now I have absolutely no way to recover this quickly.

[00:16:10] Speaker: A little backups are your friend. That's another thing is always having a backup of the website. But yes I've may or may not have done that by accident a few times. Or I went, what happens if I remove this snippet? And then the Oh, that broke the page. Okay. Just going to put that little snippet back in there. Actually. It got me thinking like a little Proustian referee of talking about people writing [00:16:30] stuff to the database. Oh, it's one of the first hacks of a website. I don't know if you've ever seen it, the Japanese Car Part Hack? So what happens is through your contact form, they inject themselves they do a SQL injection and I guess get logins and then write to your database, a little PHP file.

[00:16:47] Speaker: And so the website goes down, like as soon as it loads, it goes down and it's replaced by this like Japanese parts importer. It's all in Japanese. It's pink and it has car parts all over it. It was, it was like, Almost [00:17:00] 10 years ago that I dealt with that. But yeah, it was it was definitely a fun one to make you go through each file and figure out like, why is this happening?

[00:17:07] Speaker: And then I figured it out and they wrote a PHP file in it and said, when the page loads, load this instead of the website. And yeah, that's why secure. Oh, that also reminds me, we forgot the most basic thing for this as well. Make sure you have an SSL certificate for your website. Yeah. Sorry, it's just so basic that I was like and I'm right now in the middle of actually [00:17:30] generating one and on a website that's hosted on AWS.

[00:17:34] Speaker: And so I'm having to go through that. And so it's, it just came back to me that I'm like, yep, make sure you have your secure and your website, because if you log in and you're not secure, that means your username and password are flowing across the internet that anyone can go find. C because it's on the

[00:17:50] Speaker 2: cryptic.

[00:17:51] Speaker 2: It's not that I forget, I always remember, but I also sometimes think who doesn't have an SSL these days? Like everybody, like it's [00:18:00] been such a standard for so long ever since Google was like, we're going to show Yeah. A warning. If you don't have an SSL and your site is not going to show and stuff like it really forced everybody to be like, why am I getting this?

[00:18:14] Speaker 2: Okay. I'll put an SSL on there. So every site pretty much has. And if you don't have an SSL, it's basically because you've put up a site maybe on your own and you just, you don't [00:18:30] know. And you think I don't have anything secure. So like, why do I need to bother with this? But. Yeah,

[00:18:37] Speaker: it's famous last words.

[00:18:38] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:18:39] Speaker: And I will say a big shout out to electronic frontier foundation and Mozilla foundation who were instrumental in creating let's encrypt, which is the free service that they paired with Google to then get it for everyone. So big shout outs to them too. Thinking about the end user and getting this free service that everyone can use to generate SSL certificates.

[00:18:59] Speaker: Cause it used to [00:19:00] be a big moneymaker for. Not a big money maker, but it was still like, they charge you a hundred bucks to do it. And

[00:19:06] Speaker 2: Oh man, I remember back when I first started, we did SSLs. They were SSL certificates were like three to $500. Like they were expensive.

[00:19:17] Speaker: Yeah. And for something that generally is like not , like there's a reason why Mozilla and EFF were able to do it for free.

[00:19:24] Speaker: And it was because it actually wasn't that as complicated if you just ran this. Like you had a [00:19:30] special surfer and it ran like a hashing code for you. And then yeah, so it's definitely, yeah, it's, we're living in a much more secure landscape than I think we've ever have which is good for most end users that it's super easy for you to secure your website by just doing some basic, basic steps.

[00:19:47] Speaker: So I think that's 2024 to have it. A much better frontier for all these things, I think is good for, average people that are starting a website and getting out there.

[00:19:59] Speaker 2: And [00:20:00] on top of having the SSL, make sure it's enforced, don't, because there are some sites that have SSLs, but you can still go to the non SSL.

[00:20:10] Speaker 2: So there, there's a way that you can force the loading of the SSL so that nobody can actually get to the non SSL version of your site. Yeah. And I believe, I can't remember the plugin name. For that, but there is a plugin to to do [00:20:30] that. I'll try to

[00:20:32] Speaker: force HTTPS. I remember I did that. It was the plug in.

[00:20:36] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And there's force SSL as well. So there's

[00:20:39] Speaker 2: yeah, maybe it might be force SSL that I was thinking, but there's probably a couple of them, but there, there are plugins that will do that for you. Again, if you go with these security plugins, like solid or work fence, they have the option in there to easily turn the.

[00:20:58] Speaker 2: The auto [00:21:00] SSL or the force SSL on some of the other things that you'll find in the additional stuff that you'll find in these plugins is things like scanning periodic scans of your site, you'll be able to set that kind of stuff up. You can set up firewalls to ban IPs and things like that.

[00:21:19] Speaker 2: Obviously the network brute force, which we talked about could be set up. And there are over, I think I mentioned some of these already, but some [00:21:30] of the system tweaks Aside from, hardening your some of your, the important files, you can limit the fact that PHP can't be executed in certain directories, which is another big one, because a lot of times when sites get hacked PHP files get hacked.

[00:21:50] Speaker 2: Placed in random places where CSS is or JavaScript files get placed in certain places. Eliminating the ability for [00:22:00] those files to even be able to execute in certain directories is another easy way to do. Yeah,

[00:22:13] Speaker: I think that's that's a big one as well. Yeah, just make sure that it's limited in its scope and where it can act and where it can do certain things, I think, is definitely a smart play.

[00:22:24] Speaker: I had a Deep and meaningful thought that has now evaded me. I obviously it wasn't that deep and meaningful, [00:22:30] but I was thinking, because the other one that we were talking about when we were starting this is like people who really should be concerned about need to take the security the most serious.

[00:22:38] Speaker: I think when we were talking, it was e commerce companies. So that's very dangerous to not be secure in getting access to the back end. Because when I worked at Shopify, I saw, Someone who, they were not very secure, someone got a hold of their passwords and they went into their website and the only thing they did was change the Stripe account number.

[00:22:55] Speaker: And so the website was making money, but it wasn't making money for the store owner. [00:23:00] And it just went directly to whoever had hacked the website. And No, I don't know what resulted in that part of it. But it's definitely, simple changes like that can be huge impacts on your business because that's anything that involves money, anything that involves the payment to just tweak it so it goes over to someone else's account, that's going to be huge.

[00:23:19] Speaker: And so definitely the one group of people who need to take it this, the most seriously are in e commerce.

[00:23:27] Speaker 2: I feel like at the end of this, I'm [00:23:30] thinking. One of the topics I Come up with to follow up on this was a topic of how to clean up or take care of a hacked site. And it might try to throw that in at some point, because I think people would probably like to see or know about the basic things that you could the steps you could take to unhack yourself.

[00:23:56] Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's. The easiest [00:24:00] way would be to have a backup plugin and maybe we'll end on the backup note with this. Basically there's a couple of backup plugins and it's recommended to use a backup plugin to keep backups on your site. Because if something does happen and you have a backup, you could easily restore from a clean version of a backup to easily fix that.

[00:24:27] Speaker 2: Whatever problem might've come up, [00:24:30] whether it's the entire site or if it's only. Certain files or a certain plugin that when arrived, having backups of the entire thing to restore or even just a small section is worthwhile. And that would be your easiest solution to a major hack site is to basically just pull one of your backups and throw it back in place, and then make sure you update and take care of whatever it was that was exploited so that it can't be done [00:25:00] again.

[00:25:00] Speaker: Yeah, no definitely big thumbs up for me for getting a, backup. Plugin like updraft is the one I use very simple to get started very simple to get set up. And has Saved my bacon, more than a few times on when you know Something goes an update was not supposed to happen or when it did happen it broke everything, stuff like that Even if it's not necessarily a hacked website, but you make a major change to the website, and then it turns out that it wasn't quite configured properly and [00:25:30] the website's down, at least you can then revert back to one where it was working, and so that's definitely a big recommendation on my part for security, because even if you lose control of your hosting, or whatever, then at least you have the files, you can go to start a new account, Get it up, reconnect the domain.

[00:25:47] Speaker: At least you have the ability to get back up relatively quickly. You may be down for a day, but at least like you have something to work with where you can, you're not completely hosed.

[00:25:58] Speaker 2: Yeah like you say it's one [00:26:00] thing to have a backup plug in and backups being created. It's another thing to make sure you're storing those backups offsite.

[00:26:08] Speaker 2: Because in that situation you just came up with, if you if you lost access to the server or the server went away completely and you were storing backups on that server, Oh, your backups are gone too. So you're still out of luck.

[00:26:21] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So the

[00:26:22] Speaker 2: importance of storing the backups offsite is important for sure.

[00:26:27] Speaker: Yeah. And I, like when I do updraft, I just connected to my [00:26:30] Google drive account. And it's like a couple gigs that are sitting on there, but because most websites aren't really that big and then, yeah, it's super easy. And you've got Google again, going back to, they're super secure, and that Google's not going away.

[00:26:44] Speaker: And then, if anything does happen for your server instance, then you just switch over to the new one and then load it in and then point the domain there, boom, you're ready to go. And so it's definitely Yeah. Another aspect of security that you backing up and updating things is the, I'd say the TLDR of [00:27:00] this whole thing was, just make sure you have a backup and make sure you, everything's up to date.

[00:27:05] Speaker 2: Yeah. That was everything. So we got through it all pretty nice. Yeah,

[00:27:12] Speaker: I, I was a little surprised that we managed to cover so much ground. And the question of course, cause I was so prepared what are we doing next?

[00:27:23] Speaker 2: Yeah, good question.

[00:27:26] Speaker: Ai for ai for your marketing. What are you doing?

[00:27:29] Speaker 2: And [00:27:30] that's going to be with myself and

[00:27:31] Speaker: pip cool. Look forward to that. Yeah. Yeah, it should be very interesting And yeah, and then we will see you guys then. Find us in Cyberpunk Marketing Mixer group. If you have any more questions, want to continue the conversation. My name is Phelan. And I'm Greg.

[00:27:51] Speaker: Thanks for joining us.

[00:27:53] Speaker 3: Bye.

00:00 - Introduction: Meet Pip & Rina
00:07 - Exploring Interest-Based Targeting
01:04 - Google vs. Facebook: Targeting Techniques
02:25 - Strategies and Real-World Applications
03:07 - Performance Impact and Comparison
04:00 - Audience Questions and Optimization Tips
05:00 - Conclusion and Key Takeaways

[00:00:00] Speaker: We are here today with a Geek Speak like usual, so I'm Pip, Seymour Digital Media.

[00:00:04] Speaker 2: I'm Rina, Littleworks Indie Media.

[00:00:07] Speaker: And today we are talking about what targeting based on interests look like, looks like on Facebook versus what it looks like on Google.

[00:00:15] Speaker: And just getting into that discussion because I think this confuses a lot of people and we both are experts in our area. So why not help people, right?

[00:00:26] Speaker 2: Yeah. So I guess, and that's pretty interesting because I had [00:00:30] gotten an organized, the original title for this live. And I chose the wrong title just because I didn't really get, have a good grasp on how it works on what it's, what things are called

[00:00:41] Speaker: on Google.

[00:00:42] Speaker: You're not the only one though. And I get confused too, right? Because I don't, Do the Facebook ads. And there's so many options in Google and there's like people use phrasing like programmatic advertising, just off the cuff. So what was [00:01:00] the you, what was the word? It's, um, interest based advertising.

[00:01:04] Speaker: Yes, that's right. And interest based advertising can be like, so what you're interested in, and you can do that on Google in several different ways. Like you can, and on Facebook, I think that's a natural category of audience. Is it not?

[00:01:19] Speaker 2: Yes, that's correct. So it's, so doing it by interests is how we talk about it on Facebook.

[00:01:26] Speaker 2: And and what that does is it actually organizes people's [00:01:30] People, you could call it keywords, but interests are the keywords that people are interested in. So it's not it's not only interests. It also includes things like job titles and whether or not you're parents and how what the ages are of your kids.

[00:01:45] Speaker 2: You can segment. Based on those things. But that is the intersection, which is different than if you're targeting according to look alike audiences or a website traffic. And that's the thing that I'm trying to distinguish from [00:02:00] because website traffic is really excellent to utilize.

[00:02:03] Speaker 2: When you're retargeting, when somebody is already familiar with your company or has you've had that first contact with them. And but how do you get that top level, that top funnel how do you get those people to your site? In the first verse. Yeah. Because you can organize according to organic SEO but we both know that's a fairly long game.

[00:02:25] Speaker: Yeah. That can be

[00:02:25] Speaker 2: a long game. So it is a long game. Yeah, it can, yeah. Yeah. And it

[00:02:29] Speaker: can start [00:02:30] quickly, but it, you have to like, there's so much that goes into it, including competition and what they're doing. So yeah, we're always playing that game, but with. With Google ads, there's a bunch of different things you can do for audience targeting.

[00:02:43] Speaker: Like with search ads, you can just do keywords, right? But you can also do targeting based on some interests. Like you could section out the parents too. You could do it for search. You could do it for display, right? So there's two networks on Google or [00:03:00] Google. There's a search and display. Yes. So the display network is like CNN and every other website on the planet, right?

[00:03:07] Speaker: It could actually be YouTube and Facebook and that's where you can retarget too, in the display. And it's so interesting because they are quite similar when we start really breaking it down.

[00:03:19] Speaker 2: But they actually function quite differently in my mind. Like they actually you don't get the same results from using each the same way.

[00:03:26] Speaker 2: That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. For example for [00:03:30] example, Facebook will find you through interests on Facebook mostly, and Google will find you through interests on Google mostly. So how does that affect the kind of traffic and the results that we get? Because I find when I run interest based campaigns on Facebook and interest based campaigns on Google, they won't.

[00:03:51] Speaker 2: And it doesn't mean that one is better than the other. I used to actually think that one was better than the other. I always used to say Facebook is way better when it comes [00:04:00] to interest because they collect so much more data. They have so many more things that you can choose for interest. Yeah, exactly.

[00:04:08] Speaker 2: So it has the data for interest that works very well. And I've always, that's been my default. We did some tests when when with interest. Based ads on Google. Kevin did them for me and we tested all of our clients and some most of the accounts didn't do [00:04:30] very well with interest based targeting and

[00:04:33] Speaker: yeah, and that makes me ask want to ask so many questions because I'm like because for If Kevin and I got in a discussion, it would be like, okay

[00:04:42] Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

[00:04:43] Speaker 2: I want to finish. I want to finish that one sentence and then let's open that up. I think that's super good. So we had almost all the campaigns. Didn't do very well with interest based except for one and we have this one random campaign That's generating [00:05:00] more Leads for us or more traffic on the website Then the keyword based ads interesting and the Facebook is based ads So it's so odd.

[00:05:12] Speaker 2: So this to me oldest it always tells me that you have to know where people are in the funnel And when people are in the top funnel scrolling on Facebook, you're more likely to interrupt them and get their attention with something that they're interested in versus when people are [00:05:30] on Google, they're usually on a mission.

[00:05:32] Speaker 2: They're usually searching something in particular, they've already got something in mind. And You sometimes those interest based ads won't catch them at that level, but the retargeting will catch them at that level, but wait, okay. And now you tell me what I know. I could feel you bursting

[00:05:51] Speaker: I'm like, okay, so interest based ads, like if Kevin did so with Google ads, because it's like WordPress.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Speaker: They give you a lot of options, and with interest based ads. So I am betting donuts to dollars. So I might have to buy you some donuts that Kevin did a P max. So what Google's done is they've created a performance max campaign that they're retargeting potentially. And. Performance max would be interest based because of how it works in the Google ad system, or Kevin could have also done display advertising [00:06:30] and he could actually, we could actually catch people with display advertising.

[00:06:36] Speaker: At top of funnel when their interest based ads on Google would be like targeting if I'm a connoisseur of restaurants and I like restaurants, I might see like when I'm reading a blog about restaurants I might see an ad, a display ad. And so that's how Google would hit you at the top of the funnel that way with interest based ads.

[00:06:57] Speaker: So there's kind of two options that I [00:07:00] think the video or the display ads. would be more specifically targeted for interest based ads because you could have to go specifically after specific interests, right? Which is always interesting. You can also do advertising like going after specific websites like CNN or, something, so I find that really interesting. There's, but, and there's that kind of ready. And Google is trying to compete, I think a little bit with Facebook, with their lookalike audiences with their customer match [00:07:30] lists, which is you get your client to give you a list and clients are all nervous about this.

[00:07:35] Speaker: Cause they're like, we're, we don't want to share information. But you're not, we don't actually touch it. It just, we upload it into the system and then Google does match it. Finds you.

[00:07:44] Speaker 2: Yeah. And the interesting thing is that the so does that work? So the email list for Google, does that only work with Gmail and Google workspace email, or is it all email?

[00:07:55] Speaker 2: How does Google have everyone's email? That's what all they

[00:07:59] Speaker: they don't [00:08:00] you give it to you give them the email list and the computer does the rest Yeah, how does the

[00:08:07] Speaker 2: computer find the person though? Do you see what I'm gonna look alike the other person?

[00:08:11] Speaker: It probably matches some criteria That is a very good question though.

[00:08:16] Speaker: Yeah. But yeah, don't tell you's

[00:08:19] Speaker 2: I don't. Yeah. But there's no way, like in Facebook, I know that they match the Facebook accounts to the email account. So if you've added that email account to your profile at any [00:08:30] part, in any way on, on your profile, then Google. Sorry, Facebook will match, will, it will look for that and see if it matches any profiles and then it will target that profile.

[00:08:40] Speaker 2: But that's what I'm asking for Google because, okay, because they would match it to

[00:08:45] Speaker: a profile because you have your review profile from your Google business profile. You have your, I, you have one, we all have our own profiles on Google too. It's not, it's Google me or something, but it's not Google me. It's like about no, I don't think I knew that.[00:09:00]

[00:09:00] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And you attach all your. And then you also need to add your assets to that, what if you have no assets then?

[00:09:06] Speaker 2: You, most people

[00:09:07] Speaker: have a website unless they're like younger than, not allowed, or people have, people now have more than, How many people do you know with more than one website?

[00:09:14] Speaker: I

[00:09:14] Speaker 2: know what you, I see what you mean. Yeah. Okay. So it is going through Google accounts. It's only, it can only go through Google accounts. It's not going to find an Outlook email or a website. Or a hotmail email or, I don't know

[00:09:28] Speaker: what other kind of emails. [00:09:30] Yeah. There's something don't search about me.

[00:09:32] Speaker: It's something different. I'll find that actually the thing. It's like your Google business profile, but for yourself and you can choose what shows up your age, name, your business. I don't think

[00:09:43] Speaker 2: I know about that. Okay. That's good to know. Okay. So that's good. So then And your business has one.

[00:09:49] Speaker 2: So then in your campaigns, when you do interest campaigns, based campaigns on Google, how do you, when you start with a new client, do you start with all of the [00:10:00] campaigns or a certain campaign and then add to that later? Or how does it work?

[00:10:05] Speaker: That's a great question. So it depends what the client wants.

[00:10:08] Speaker: A lot of the times we often start with a search. It depends on the strategy too. Actually we're going to be talking about strategy in our bootcamp. That's one of our classes, but yeah, one of the strategies you have, you're faced with, determining when you do Google Ads is what you're gonna do.

[00:10:22] Speaker: Yeah. And we like mostly searches the, like the search ads are the fundamental [00:10:30] beginner, the thing that started Google Ads, we're all still using those. I would very simply, as strange as this sounds, and maybe five years ago I wouldn't have said this, I'd start with a brand campaign probably right outta the gate.

[00:10:43] Speaker: And then that would help me create retargeting, right? Because you have to build your audience. I think you need a thousand people to your website before it can activate. So you want to get that set up right away. We turn on that. That's called signals in Google analytics.

[00:10:59] Speaker 2: Right.

[00:10:59] Speaker: And then [00:11:00] we would determine like if, so if they want to do interest based targeting, like I would first do a search campaign and then we would probably try a performance max or a display comes third display with would be the interest based or the performance max and Google pushes you to do P max.

[00:11:16] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Because it's also shopping if you're e commerce. If you go through

[00:11:18] Speaker 2: those, if you go through those automated set up wizard things, isn't that what it

[00:11:24] Speaker: usually puts in here? Yeah. And there's so much coming in there. I think, how does Facebook help you create [00:11:30] ads for your interest audiences?

[00:11:33] Speaker: Yeah. So

[00:11:34] Speaker 2: it actually, you actually have to make an effort to do an interest based ad now. You have to go in at the very bottom and click that you want in that interest based thing. It's really small spot. It's like they've actually, they're deterring us away from doing that. And it's really quite interesting.

[00:11:57] Speaker 2: I'm not really sure how I feel about it because I [00:12:00] don't know enough about the AI part of it, but or what they're doing. And they don't really like they, the Facebook Facebook has really gone away from being narrow targeting to very open targeting and doing a lot of lookalikes. I like lookalikes, as long as the first as long as what they're looking at is narrow and good.

[00:12:20] Speaker 2: But what I found in the last I did a campaign early spring and I found that the quality of the leads, We're way [00:12:30] down low. So I went in and narrowed up, like I went with Facebook's default. And then I went in and narrowed it up. So we went with the default and it was way too broad. It the calls that we were getting were low quality, lower quality, or at least that was what the client was saying.

[00:12:49] Speaker 2: So then I went back in. Yeah. What? Yeah. You have to ask your clients how the leads are. You can't just send them. And it's your

[00:12:57] Speaker: job to get them leads, but it's also, it's our [00:13:00] job to get good leads in the end by communicating with our clients about what's happening. And that's how you do.

[00:13:05] Speaker: Great ads, right? You need a relationship.

[00:13:08] Speaker 2: So it feels like what they're trying to build on Facebook is something that anybody could use. Like it's become infinitely more complicated in some ways. And then really default settings everywhere. Google and Facebook

[00:13:23] Speaker: are trying to compete for I think Phelan always says, Google looked over at Facebook and was like, Oh, I [00:13:30] wish it could be you and not give anybody anything.

[00:13:34] Speaker: Any options? Yeah, Google has a lot, but they're taking them away.

[00:13:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't really like that because then my value is diminished because what my superpower was getting that targeting right. And That's what I, that's what I really love doing. And now it's a lot harder. It's especially harder because they've taken away so many categories that we're not allowed to actually target anymore.[00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Speaker 2: Look, I'm putting this over

[00:14:00] Speaker: your head, cause you're here and I think that looks good. So Steven, okay. So first let's say hi to Greg. Hi, Greg. And yes, I'm talking about, I'll send you the link. It's called What is it called? It's called myaccount. google. com forward slash profile. We all have one. We have one for our business.

[00:14:16] Speaker: We can have one personally. Steven is saying and yeah Greg's really helpful with this. And then Steven, ooh, what budgets were you looking at for these? Ooh, good question. Steven does Facebook ads. Yeah,

[00:14:27] Speaker 2: and this is what I want to talk about. So I have a question, I'm going to [00:14:30] answer. That question in a minute.

[00:14:32] Speaker 2: I want to ask pip a question that's been bugging me first and then we can go back to how we actually do it because I do have a secret system that I use for budget. So Pip, when a client says to you, we have a target of 15 15 calls or 15 leads a week that's what we want you to get. How do you respond to that in terms of expectation, setting expectations and having them understand the process?

[00:14:59] Speaker 2: [00:15:00] Because I could use some tips. Okay.

[00:15:02] Speaker: Oh, I love this. Okay. And then we'll answer Stephen's question and we'll come back to that. So you, yes. Okay. So how would I answer that for Google ads? I want 15 leads. I would say, how many leads are you getting now? And then I would figure out what the percentage, so you want me to get this percentage of leads by what time?

[00:15:20] Speaker: What's the, make it that smart goal. Every week? Okay, every week. And and how are you doing that? On Facebook? Or? We have a combination of [00:15:30] Facebook ads running and Google ads. Okay. And the outcome is filling in a form? And what were they doing last year? No, the outcome is booking a call on Calendly.

[00:15:38] Speaker: Okay. And are we tracking the Calendly? Yeah, yes, we are. Okay. I would say first I would say, okay, for sure. And for myself, for Google, I would say, okay, let me go. I'm going to go and find out how, what the cost per click is, right? Cost per click. Average cost per click. I'm going to find the average cost per click and then I'm going to multiply it.

[00:15:59] Speaker: [00:16:00] So if we do the right math equation, it is what you were aiming for is one lead, which is. One lead per 10, right? If everything is golden. And so if people come to your landing page and it doesn't work then you have to fix your landing page. So it could take longer. So how much budget are you going to give me to hit this number?

[00:16:23] Speaker: That's so I can't, I can definitely a hundred percent do it, but I need to know the cost per click and [00:16:30] because how many clicks do you need to get a lead? And then how many leads do you want? You want the five leads? So they need 50 clicks at how much? Right.

[00:16:39] Speaker 2: Here's the thing, and this is, I work at it a little bit differently.

[00:16:42] Speaker 2: I like the way you think though. So I worked it a little bit differently. What I like to do is I set up my ads, I test my ads, I get the two parts working together. So we use Top Funnel Interest moving over to the website and then we retarget we retarget with Calendly Link because they've already educated themselves.

[00:16:59] Speaker 2: [00:17:00] Or they've already looked at the website. Because we were finding when we went directly to Calendly, we got a ton of clicks and not as many bookings. And then of those bookings, the bookings were, asking what is it that you do? And we want them to already know that by then.

[00:17:16] Speaker 2: So we flipped the switch, got them to the website first and then put them to the Calendly. And that's our strategy. And what I like about it is that it has an actual, even Steven. Number of [00:17:30] leads that it provides every week. It's pretty consistent over the last six months, but we had a drop sometime around November.

[00:17:38] Speaker 2: We had a drop November, December. I forgot when a few months ago anyways, we had, or maybe it's a little later than that actually. It's a cyclical business. Yeah. No, I don't, I I don't, it's not a cyclical business in terms that it actually organizes itself every month. There's new cohort. However, I think that people think about education at particular times of [00:18:00] the year.

[00:18:00] Speaker 2: So they look into it. And also we found out that there's a half drop, like half a 50 percent drop right after the American long weekends every week. Like consistently. Which was interesting. But what I know is I like to get them at an even Steven number of whatever it is that they want based on the budget that we have.

[00:18:21] Speaker 2: And then I like to go to the client and say, okay, so this ad spend creates this. Results if you want to scale that up [00:18:30] to 15, we need to add, we need to scale up the ad spin because we've got the ads performing at a good click through rate and the quality of calls are good. So now this is the time to scale up.

[00:18:42] Speaker 2: So that's what I'm thinking.

[00:18:44] Speaker: I get to track it like. What, when you ask what budget do you want to spend? They're like I don't know. I'm like, oh, okay. Just tell me a budget. We just need

[00:18:52] Speaker 2: to

[00:18:52] Speaker: start. Yeah. We just

[00:18:54] Speaker 2: need to start and then we can figure out what we can do from there. So let's go back to this.

[00:18:58] Speaker 2: Yeah. Let's go back to this question. [00:19:00] How long, okay. Did it, okay. So wait, no, we have to,

[00:19:03] Speaker: let's tell everybody what budget are you looking for at these and how long did it take before you. They were poor quality great question.

[00:19:13] Speaker 2: Okay, so how I like to work My ads is I actually test them for the first month.

[00:19:19] Speaker 2: So I don't put a huge ad spend out I put a very small ad spend on things I'm talking Facebook ads here not Google ads But we only [00:19:30] start with the minimum amount of Google spend we start with is 500 anyways most people that's where they're starting with Facebook. I usually start with 20 a day and that's it.

[00:19:40] Speaker 2: And then I test my ads and my landing page to make sure that's that's converting first. So once I have, around. I don't know, it could be 5 percent click through rate. When I've got 5 percent click through rate on my ad, then I figure, okay, the ad's running. In this particular case, we had a 10%, over a 10 percent click through rate, [00:20:00] so the ad was performing well.

[00:20:02] Speaker 2: That, that means that you're targeting the right people, everyone's going over to the reach. Messaging is right.

[00:20:06] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:07] Speaker 2: Yeah. But then we had a huge drop off immediately on the landing page, like two second drop offs. And and we've spent a long time. Yeah. No it's core vital issues.

[00:20:18] Speaker 2: There are lots of core. Yeah. Yeah. Really slow to load. Yeah. Confusing navigation not clear messaging. So we've gone and revamped those those [00:20:30] pages and the and then the the calls went back up. We're now sitting at that. So I feel if you really want to do something good with Facebook, you want a minimum 500 to a thousand dollar ad spend.

[00:20:43] Speaker 2: per month commitment, but don't start out with that. Start out slow and get your click through rate on your ad performing first. Figure out the best image, the best content. Title, the best call to action, which usually is learn more no matter what. And [00:21:00] and the best messaging description or whatever the messaging is.

[00:21:03] Speaker 2: And then once you've got that at a good click through rate. So I think they say that the average click through rate on Facebook is 0. 04 was the last time I had heard, but that's super low. And we have to consider that we have a lot of people on Facebook running ads that hit that boost post.

[00:21:21] Speaker 2: Function and that's probably in that data too. So we want to aim for, I don't know, anything between three to 5 percent I think is decent. [00:21:30] Anything above that is great. That's what I, that's how I would answer that.

[00:21:33] Speaker: I think we had two very interesting answers that did a lot of the same thing.

[00:21:37] Speaker: I will tell you that actually we've started offering search engine marketing services instead of, which is some people confuse that with just Google ads. But search engine marketing is SEO and Google ads. Yeah. Okay. Or that's how we learned it back in the day. Because it's all marketing in the end, And do you

[00:21:59] Speaker 2: consider [00:22:00] search engine, do you consider shopping ads as part of that mix

[00:22:04] Speaker: too?

[00:22:04] Speaker: Okay. Search engine marketing. So SEM and it encompasses SEO and Google ads. And the reason we are doing that is because Somebody will buy Google ads from us and we'll set up the campaigns, we'll get them going. And then we'll look at the, we'll get great click through rate and everything will be great, but we'll have this landing page problem.

[00:22:23] Speaker: And if we're not creating just a landing page out of the box to get them going over on lead pages or something, we're going to, [00:22:30] do the speed test. And then we're going to recommend, Hey, Let's stop doing Google ads for now until we can get your your ship a little bit to convert your page needs to convert your pages and converting, then we fix the page and we try, and that's where you have to spend the time and see what people are doing.

[00:22:47] Speaker 2: So we're in the middle of relaunching a brand new site and and then we'll be able to tell from that how soon we can scale up the ad spend.

[00:22:57] Speaker: Yeah. And the other thing to do is use [00:23:00] something like lead pages. I don't know if you use them, but they, they take out that component. Sorry, I missed that.

[00:23:05] Speaker: Oh, use like lead pages or whatever a landing page is, right? Because they, you can pick something that converts. More easily to build. You can, but you do need access to the domain to get that. That's true.

[00:23:20] Speaker 2: So we're talking about setting up separately separate landing pages that function as your website page so that, and they're [00:23:30] dying, they can be dynamic.

[00:23:31] Speaker 2: You can a, B split test them. You can't, they come with, you hide them from Google.

[00:23:36] Speaker: For Google SEO you hide them because you don't want them to downgrade your site Necessarily but you do get to see things in analytics like how a lead jumps, you know Through the sea or the web of the internet to get to you and how many times they visit you So yeah, right to convert so in the end, I think you know [00:24:00] If we're going to jump back to what targeting and interest and lookalike audience and things, it looks oh, wait, Greg's saying something.

[00:24:09] Speaker: Uh, oh yeah. Kenneth Greg what

[00:24:11] Speaker 2: can we do? Yeah, it's true. There is a plugin. He's talking about, there's a plugin WordPress lead pages, I think, or something called something like that. And and you. Yeah. So at the beginning of the new page plugin, it wasn't particularly good, but it's, it is actually quite developed now so that you don't have to have a [00:24:30] third party.

[00:24:30] Speaker 2: You can run it all on your site and your own hosting. You don't need a third party subscription.

[00:24:35] Speaker: Okay. I want to look at Greg that Greg, will you share that below? And we are, we have three minutes to go. So Rena, last thoughts, last question,

[00:24:42] Speaker 2: I thought we were going to add at 10 minutes after I'm like, Oh, this is going to be a lot of time.

[00:24:48] Speaker 2: And then of course it always goes by so

[00:24:50] Speaker: quick. Because it's always an interesting conversation when you're talking about marketing. But Greg, good point. Share that and anything else that. I don't think we mentioned anything [00:25:00] else in this, but if you'd like us to share anything else, let us know. And yeah, last thoughts, Rina on the Facebook versus Google.

[00:25:05] Speaker: Do you still like Facebook more? Yeah. Google more.

[00:25:08] Speaker 2: No, I use I use my proprietary system is a combination of two working together with the same strategy. And I think that's what, what makes ours kick ass quite frankly. And the first thing last thought is before you do any kind of ads, get an audit done on your website.

[00:25:25] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And not one of those ones where you just plug in your information. They send you stuff. Yeah. They'd [00:25:30] be like, you don't have a Google business profile, but you do.

[00:25:32] Speaker 2: Yeah. If you're, if your site speed is too slow, it's not, you're going to need to fix that before you run ads. That's the ideal scenario.

[00:25:41] Speaker 2: And

[00:25:43] Speaker: this is why we come together because marketing is a group effort. And we, we're search social and websites. Look, we got Greg here. He's, he's the expert. We all do all three, I think, but we have Specialties Rina? Specialist in Facebook ads. Yeah, it's the [00:26:00] favorites, right?

[00:26:00] Speaker: Who could go on and on about Google forever? Anyways, we have to quickly mention before we go, remember that leak? Y'all, I think we might bump some stuff and talk about some stuff in the next week or two about that Google leak. There's lots of opinions. If you want to see a topic, let us know because we're always here every Thursday.

[00:26:18] Speaker: And next week, Rina, do you know what we're talking about?

[00:26:21] Speaker 2: No,

[00:26:23] Speaker: we are talking about security matters with safeguarding your website with LAN and who's that guy? Who's that guy? [00:26:30] I think it's Greg anyway. Oh my gosh. That's a question while I'm having a coffee, but , sorry. Yeah, are you okay? Rena's having allergic reaction, but you look beautiful and we will see you all next time, everybody.

[00:26:43] Speaker: Bye. Have a great day.

[00:00:00] Introduction and guest welcome

[00:03:00] Exploration of current sales challenges and the importance of the discovery process

[00:10:00] Strategies for engaging potential clients and the role of content in sales

[00:16:00] Insights on maintaining client relationships and the impact of strategy over closing

[00:20:00] Darby's top book recommendations for sales mastery

[00:23:00] Wrap-up and teaser for next week's topic on advertising strategies

[00:00:00] Speaker: Hello, everybody. We are here today with Darby, who is like one of my heroes. Darby and I met a few years ago and he's in, he's inspiring in sales. He works at, where do you work?

[00:00:13] Speaker 2: Agency Mastery 360.

[00:00:15] Speaker: And you've been there a long time.

[00:00:18] Speaker 2: Not long in the grand scheme of things, but yeah, I've been there three years now.

[00:00:21] Speaker 2: So three

[00:00:22] Speaker: years is pretty good. And so the reason I brought you on here, where we are in Geek Speak in our Facebook group, but we [00:00:30] also are on YouTube and a couple other channels in our podcast, which we actually started because of the group I was in with you. I did. And it was really life changing and I had to go and implement.

[00:00:45] Speaker: And that's why I moved on, but I wanted all my agency friends and people interested in sales to get to meet you. And let's really talk about sales. Cause. The market's changed. Agencies aren't getting those phone calls like they used to, right? It's, and [00:01:00] there's, I'm competing. I I had to compete this week for my job that I have with this client.

[00:01:09] Speaker: For two years, I've been with them and here comes this other agency. And I looked at their stuff and they are good. They look good. I've proven myself for two years. But I'm not the only one coming up against this. And so I know other salespeople are other agencies are struggling with sales. So I thought perfect timing to talk to you.

[00:01:27] Speaker: And so I figure you'd take me through what [00:01:30] is the problems that we're having, you're seeing with agency sales. Cause you talk to agency owners. Are they struggling? Is it in my head? Tell me everything.

[00:01:39] Speaker 2: Yes. Everybody's struggling with something, right? But I think most people struggle with sales because they take it in such a broad view.

[00:01:48] Speaker 2: Sales is just this big, Scary word, that lives in the hills and it's people fail, I think, to break down the different components of sales and then [00:02:00] addressing them individually and making sure that there's something that's well thought out process driven, value driven. Each stage in the sales cycle.

[00:02:09] Speaker 2: I talked to so many people that don't even really have a complete buyer's journey mapped out, or they don't really have a clear understanding of their sales process and their sales cycle in terms of timeframes and desired outcomes and moving from one stage to the next. And, so many people just wing it because they just are able to connect with people and talk with people and [00:02:30] they jump on a call and they can solve a problem and then they throw a price tag on it and it works.

[00:02:34] Speaker 2: And that's great if you want to do it yourself forever, but until you get things to be a little more process driven, you're going to have a hard time when it comes to predictability. You're going to have a hard time with having, something that you can eventually work yourself out of, little pieces at a time to where you can focus on some of the other things in the business.

[00:02:55] Speaker: So interesting. Cause you say, I feel guilty [00:03:00] because when we first met, You took me on this journey and you showed me where my processors were broken. And now, we've grown and we've done all the things to fix our process. And then we have other things broken. And as I talked to you, I realized it might be a bit of my sales process.

[00:03:16] Speaker: I want to be, A good closer and I can think I am, but the reality is, am I, and do I have a process and can I hand it off? So how do you direct other agencies in fixing their sales [00:03:30] pipeline? Initially, how do you fix yours?

[00:03:34] Speaker 2: I'm really passionate about the discovery process. It sounds so stupid to say that out loud, but it's true.

[00:03:41] Speaker 2: I just, I think it's. I think it's so overlooked. I think so many people don't really put a lot of thought and effort into that discovery process other than from what they're trying to get out of it from the salesperson perspective, right? They're trying to qualify to make [00:04:00] sure that they have budget.

[00:04:01] Speaker 2: They're trying to assess the level of importance and their willingness to, to move forward. Are they a good candidate? Are they a good prospect? But they're not really doing enough to demonstrate value to build a relationship to affirm in the prospects eyes that they're a good fit for them.

[00:04:21] Speaker 2: I use a dating analogy on strategy calls on a regular basis. And I think dating and sales [00:04:30] are so similar in a lot of ways. Now, fortunately I've been married a very long time and I haven't had to go through any dating bullshit in a very long time. But if I did, you would never show up to a first date, talk all about yourself and ask that person a bunch of questions that have nothing to do with helping them.

[00:04:48] Speaker 2: You wouldn't just show up and throw up all over a person and Oh, these are all the great things about me. Look at all the great things about what we do. You would show up to a first date and you would ask questions about them. You're trying to show them how you can be A [00:05:00] potentially good fit for them and their eyes.

[00:05:02] Speaker 2: I think that's where it really starts is just making sure that you're building that relationship from the onset and really demonstrating to that person that you truly have their best interest at heart and finding a solution for them, whether that's with you or somewhere else and having a line of questions and things.

[00:05:18] Speaker 2: Designed to enable you to do that.

[00:05:21] Speaker: And so you have a bunch of questions you ask, or do you let the conversation just flow and you're just there to learn about them for a little bit and give them [00:05:30] some helpful advice?

[00:05:31] Speaker 2: Potentially. I have a format that I follow each and every single time without fail. I have a little line of questions that I have on a document on my iPad and I create a fresh copy every time I start a discovery call and I take notes diligently each and every single time.

[00:05:48] Speaker 2: And. I follow the process and I've been doing it for a long time. I've done it other places. And that's, I think where people fail is you get a level of confidence when you're doing things well, when you're following the [00:06:00] process and then you naturally just start to deviate in little bits and pieces further and further away from that, as you start to wing it because you're not following the process and next thing you wake up one day and you're so far off base from where you were in the beginning.

[00:06:14] Speaker 2: And what was working, right? That's the thing. Jason and I have this thing all the time where we'll have a conversation. We'll say, Hey, remember when we used to do that thing that really worked really well and he'll say, yeah, I remember. And we'll go, why did we stop doing that? And they're like, I have no idea why we stopped doing that.

[00:06:29] Speaker 2: And [00:06:30] then we'll say, maybe we should start doing that again. And then we do, but I think it's just natural human tendency that you just go off the path and you need something to pull you back on track. Yeah, I, every time without fail.

[00:06:43] Speaker: Most agency owners will say, I get most of my leads from inbound.

[00:06:48] Speaker: This is true. We do, once we get a reputation, you get, you do get referral business, but we always need that plan about getting sales, right? About going out. And so [00:07:00] do you include your, the marketing in part of that, or do you, are you doing like outreach on the phone or like, how are you managing it?

[00:07:07] Speaker: I know you all have, A bunch of funnels because I was in one. And,

[00:07:10] Speaker 2: So from a business development perspective, me personally, I do very little, unfortunately we have a pretty strong marketing arm and did prior to me being here, but I will say that the outreach that I do is for our podcast. The best way for us to get people in the funnel is [00:07:30] to target our ideal.

[00:07:31] Speaker 2: Client who is also our ideal podcast guest. And by reaching out via LinkedIn, I connect with agency owners. I probably have five to seven calls a week, which are just pre interview calls for podcast guests. And the reason that works for us is we're able to do a few things, as I'm reaching out to these people.

[00:07:54] Speaker 2: I'm a making them aware of the content that we're creating and chances [00:08:00] are a small percentage of them will start to consume it. And that's the goal. Consumption is the goal. Secondly, some of them will respond and say, Hey, that sounds like fun. That sounds like something I'd like to do. So what do they do?

[00:08:11] Speaker 2: They jump on a call with me. I get an opportunity to make some sort of connection, just very friendly, non confrontational. I'm not there to sell them a damn thing. We're just here to meet and say, hello. Okay. And see if we like each other. And then they'll do a podcast episode with us. They'll record an episode.

[00:08:25] Speaker 2: And then they end up in a little bit of an email funnel from there where we'll share [00:08:30] case stories. And, oftentimes people will say, Hey, you guys have that mastermind thing. I'd love to, to hear more about that. Or I'd love to. To learn more about that. And that's great. That's just gravy because quite honestly, we're very genuine in our approach.

[00:08:42] Speaker 2: And the fact that we are looking to find great people to come on and share their stories and deliver value to the listening audience. That's the number one priority, but there's some ancillary benefits as well.

[00:08:53] Speaker: It is. I listened to that podcast and I have been in that group and I do really have nothing [00:09:00] but good things to say because it did help change my business.

[00:09:02] Speaker: I found that with many things you have to go and implement. And yeah, it's just it's exceptional how your sales process was actually one of the best things I went through because it helped me. It really helped me even if I didn't move forward. And that's, sorry about the dogs.

[00:09:21] Speaker: We have

[00:09:21] Speaker 2: too many. I was gonna say the Amazon man must be there.

[00:09:26] Speaker: They walk in the gate!

[00:09:28] Speaker 2: That's what happens with mine. I have [00:09:30] three and they go bananas any time somebody comes through the front door. And I know you have about six times that many.

[00:09:34] Speaker: No, just four. But once one, I will say one is a bit old now.

[00:09:38] Speaker: So he's just they're like, they set each other off. It's fun. Yes, and you moved, didn't you? You moved from Florida. Should tell a little bit. I did. To where? I'm

[00:09:47] Speaker 2: in North Carolina now.

[00:09:48] Speaker: Okay, so more treed areas. Yes. Yeah.

[00:09:51] Speaker 2: Very much yeah. Oh, I bet

[00:09:53] Speaker: it's lovely. As you

[00:09:54] Speaker 2: can see from all my background images, I've got the trees everywhere.

[00:09:58] Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So that makes [00:10:00] you calmer. And are you getting more people in your area that are joining the Mastermind for Sales? Not

[00:10:06] Speaker 2: really. We're so location agnostic. We have members from honestly all over the world. We've got members in multiple countries, multiple continents, it's what we do is Fairly universal and

[00:10:19] Speaker: needed, I will say I am good friends with two women from that group still.

[00:10:24] Speaker: And they are rock stars. We call ourselves a million dollar club just cause that's where [00:10:30] we're going. But it's, it helps. We, it really did help. I want to talk about how you get from, An agency owner talking to you to or what agency owners doing, like in that circular process you have of cause you identify their problems.

[00:10:45] Speaker: Like you're not, as you said, you're not pitching. And that makes it really comfortable. So are you giving, just giving away information? People will like, do people take advantage of that? Tell me, cause tell me how it flows. [00:11:00] It's like where you're not getting taken advantage of. We all know scope creep.

[00:11:03] Speaker: It happens in sales calls.

[00:11:07] Speaker 2: It's almost like I set you up for that, which I didn't, but it was perfect because that's, this is something that we harp on constantly within the group, which you'll remember is that foot in the door offer, right? That strategy session that we do with. A prospect is a paid engagement.

[00:11:20] Speaker 2: It's very inexpensive. It's fully refundable. If for any reason you feel like it sucked, if you get on a 90 minute call with me and I don't deliver on the [00:11:30] promise and you feel for any reason, I didn't, it's We'll give you the money back, but that's how we prevent people from taking advantage of that.

[00:11:37] Speaker 2: Because, I'm a firm believer that people enter a sales cycle for two reasons. They're either curious or they have intent, period. That's it. So as long as you're willing to satisfy a curiosity and there's no resistance introduced at any point in that process, that person is going to continue to take and take as much as you're willing to give until there's something new.

[00:11:59] Speaker 2: [00:12:00] Layered in where they have to make a decision whether that's to Make a small investment, do some homework, provide you with some, more detailed, important information to where they actually have to put some effort in until you layer in some sort of resistance. A curious prospect will take as much as you're willing to give.

[00:12:19] Speaker 2: And that's where people fall into that trap of over delivering, giving free guidance and free strategy and free advice. Because the curious prospects, that's the only reason they're [00:12:30] there. They never came with buying intent. My wife looks at RVs all the time and we're not buying an RV anytime soon, but she's in the curious stage.

[00:12:39] Speaker 2: Lots of people are in the curious stage. So the way you separate out the people, separate out the people who are in the intent stage is to layer in a little resistance, right? Which we call our foot in the door offer. Just a small investment where you're going to deliver on some substantial value.

[00:12:54] Speaker 2: They're going to get something that they can use without question with or without you be on [00:13:00] that stage. It's just a great litmus test to get people out of the way that are there for no other reason than to satisfy a curiosity.

[00:13:08] Speaker: I like that too. And it does, you do. So what does the person walk away with?

[00:13:12] Speaker: So the process is I reach out to you and then we hop on a call. We figure we, we get along. It's probably a quick call. Yeah. And then we set up a next call and I'm in the buying process there. I have to buy the next Call, but I'm [00:13:30] getting a strategy or a, and a strategy to help me with my specific problem.

[00:13:37] Speaker 2: Correct. The way I position it is that we're going to spend 90 minutes building a scaling plan together. And I think that's one of the most important parts about being effective with some sort of offer like this is it has to be interactive. It has to be something that you're doing together because then there's emotional attachment.

[00:13:53] Speaker 2: There's business. Buy in, you feel like you're a creator of this. It, the things are going to connect with you [00:14:00] because it's a piece of you. And you want that connection point, but sorry, I went off on a tangent as I always do, but so I'll position it as, look, we're going to build a scaling plan together by the time my goal for that call is to do a few things.

[00:14:12] Speaker 2: Number one, I'm going to give you some reassurance and some validation. To some of the issues that you already know you have, but on top of that, we're going to layer in some potential solutions and maybe some underlying issues on why those exist. The other thing I want to do is bring to light some things that you probably weren't aware of through that [00:14:30] process.

[00:14:30] Speaker 2: I'm going to make you aware of some other gaps or some other holes that you have that maybe weren't necessarily a priority. But probably should be. And we're going to discuss why. And then finally, by the time it's all said and done, we're going to have a nice little list of what things you should be addressing in what order and why to overcome some of the challenges that you're facing right now.

[00:14:52] Speaker 2: So I think the big difference I like to say here is this is the difference between providing a service and [00:15:00] providing a solution. If you're providing a service, that's a commodity. You can get email marketing. You can get PPC, you can get ads. You can get, these are services there. There's a million people out there that are happily sell it to you.

[00:15:15] Speaker 2: Until you're providing a solution. You're not really connecting in the way that you need to be to get a decision in some instances or decisions from the right people. So I think that's, and again, in order to provide [00:15:30] a solution, you have to be able to position yourself as a trusted advisor.

[00:15:33] Speaker 2: You have to be able to provide value. You have to be able to demonstrate that you're here to provide something that's specific to you and your need. Beyond what just the service is in itself.

[00:15:46] Speaker: Isn't that funny? Cause that's, what's going to set people apart. I think in the next phase of marketing and where we're going I don't know what you're seeing, but I'm seeing a lot of people who are strategists coming into the market because they've lost [00:16:00] their job somewhere.

[00:16:01] Speaker: And so they know how to. They know how to tell people what to do, but they're not an implementer. And so as we see this come into the market, we're going to see shifts. And as we see shifts, we're going to have to. have different real differentiators now between what makes a great agency and what makes a good one.

[00:16:22] Speaker: And I think it'll be like real estate agents, like the strong will survive maybe. Oh, wait. Oh, working on my comment [00:16:30] structure. Look at that. Oh we have Phelan saying there's been a lot of change in the agency space recently. Are you seeing that Darby? Do you see it in your sales process too?

[00:16:39] Speaker 2: A little bit.

[00:16:40] Speaker 2: We're seeing it from a lot of people just. They're, like you said at the top of the call, they're having to fight to keep the relationships they already have. And it's a, it's a crowded space. We all know that. It's immensely crowded. Low barrier to entry. Correct. So you have to have a differentiator.

[00:16:57] Speaker 2: And like you were just saying with the strategist thing, [00:17:00] I'll take a strategist over a closer any day of the week, right? Because for me, a closer just carries a little bit of a negative connotation because a closer means that you have a selfish goal in mind and that is to close and that benefits you and nobody else.

[00:17:17] Speaker 2: So if you're providing strategy and you're providing solutions, there's a mutual benefit there. And I think that's important. Closers, closers are great when you're selling widgets, right? Cause once the sale's done, it's a done deal. They've got their [00:17:30] product, they move on, you don't have to look them in the face anymore.

[00:17:33] Speaker 2: Whether they're happy or not with their purchase after the fact, there's no weight on you. Whereas in what we do in a service based business, when you're, when you actually give a shit about. The people that you're working with getting the results that they came for. The worst thing you can do is be a closer because you're going to push people into decisions that they necessarily weren't ready to make.

[00:17:56] Speaker 2: And that's a recipe for early churn. That's a recipe for a bad [00:18:00] relationship. Those are the things that I just had a blueprint session with somebody last week and we discussed this ad nauseum because his salesperson is doing a good job. They feel like. But they're seeing a lot of clients churn pretty quickly.

[00:18:17] Speaker 2: And I think that's, an element of that is not setting proper expectations during the sales process, not making, making it clear what the path looks like, and then now you're [00:18:30] two, three months in, and this is nothing like what I signed up for because you are pushed into a close. Instead of making an informed decision for a solution.

[00:18:39] Speaker: Ah, yes. So not rushing, maybe, right? Giving people the space to make the decisions they need to make. It's really interesting. One of the main things we sell is a measure setup. And in that people get an outcome, but what they don't realize is that outcome benefits them for years to come. But it's so strange because the outcome we give [00:19:00] them is almost a piece of paper with a bunch of graphs on it.

[00:19:03] Speaker: And they're like what is this? We're like no, this is really like we've dialed all the buttons over here to create this so that you never have to worry about dialing the buttons. And it's a very hard thing to sell because it benefits you in the future because it makes you make data driven decisions.

[00:19:20] Speaker: But The value is in the long term relationship because then they learn what a session is and how long it is or like what a, what we're measuring as [00:19:30] a lead and they learn, and that's the thing we've had some clients for seven years, which we're very fortunate. I say, I have a joke, I say we had one of our team members asked me how long do clients stay?

[00:19:40] Speaker: And I was like we like to say we're like accountants, seven years or until you're dead, that's what we want. And and it works, but the reason it works is because it's a relationship. It and we're not just oh no, we only do Google ads. Oh, you need that. Okay. Let's see what we can do.

[00:19:57] Speaker: And yeah. And as we grow, I'm not, we don't [00:20:00] give away everything, but we definitely document everything we do for our clients so that we can show our value. Cause it's not just email. In leads and conversions, it's in education, relationship, marketing is a huge field now, right? And so what is the ideal customer coming to you?

[00:20:19] Speaker: Like, how do you know they're the ideal one for you when they're getting in touch with you?

[00:20:25] Speaker 2: That's tough. That's a big part of the reason that we do the blueprint [00:20:30] process is we want to be selective and. The people that we work with and, there's a lot of organizations that say that and they market scarcity and exclusivity and it's a pile of crap, but we want to make sure that we would rather generate less revenue and work with people that are going to get results, right?

[00:20:54] Speaker 2: We want, you can sign up for the gym membership all day long, but if you don't get your ass on the treadmill, you're never going to get in [00:21:00] shape. We have no interest in selling gym memberships. We want people that are going to come and put in the work. It's huge. Our ideal person is a contributor.

[00:21:12] Speaker 2: Someone that sees and understands the value And helping others and being transparent and being vulnerable and sharing, Hey, these are the experiences that I've had, and these are the things that I've learned, and these are the decisions I've made, and these are some of the things that I wish I could take back or I would do differently.

[00:21:28] Speaker 2: And to be able to share that with [00:21:30] someone else that's on a similar path to help them avoid some of those mistakes. That's the type of person that that fits in best with what we do.

[00:21:39] Speaker: Oh my gosh, I was ideal. I will tell you, I do have to plug you for a minute. So anybody out there listening I was part of this agency mastermind.

[00:21:50] Speaker: It was life changing. I sold my biggest website project I ever sold. I changed my systems. I I [00:22:00] avoided hiring somebody and spending so much money before I was ready because it's not just, and I'm not plugging anyone to go. It was

[00:22:08] Speaker 2: going to be a

[00:22:09] Speaker: salesperson too. It was going to be a salesperson. And and so it's a team of people behind it, but if you're looking to grow One of the best things I did for my career so far was joining a mastermind of other agency owners.

[00:22:21] Speaker: It, it was brilliant. So if you get an opportunity, I would say do it, but because it can be life changing and it was, and this is a big plug. I'm not in the group [00:22:30] right now because I have to go implement. But I know people that still are in the group and everybody's just doing so great and I really miss it.

[00:22:38] Speaker: Anyway.

[00:22:39] Speaker 2: That was very kind. Thank you. I sincerely appreciate that. You were a phenomenal member and it's a textbook example of what it is that we look for, because that's what makes what we do work, right? Because the value in what we have is a hundred percent contingent upon the people that we have in it.

[00:22:56] Speaker 2: And if there are egos or if there are. [00:23:00] Bullshit artists or people who are highly competitive. It's, it ruins the dynamic. It's just you, and you've got to have, you got to have the right people. And you're one of those people and we miss

[00:23:13] Speaker: you. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to talk after this guys, but I will tell you, so if you're doing sales, if you're struggling with sales we're going to ask Darby one, one more question, probably maybe two, but the question is Darby, what is your favorite sales Book.

[00:23:27] Speaker 2: Oh geez.

[00:23:28] Speaker: Oh, bam. [00:23:30] Or favorite person to follow for sales, maybe.

[00:23:33] Speaker 2: See, I quite honestly don't get into that shit very much. I just, .

[00:23:37] Speaker: No Grant Cardone for

[00:23:38] Speaker 2: you? No. I would say The Perfect Close by James Muir is a really good one and it's really all about not being a closer and, the title is a little deceptive.

[00:23:49] Speaker 2: It really speaks to the ability to deliver value and all of the kind of things that I spoke about so far, so I'd say that's good. Gap Selling by Keenan is pretty decent. I [00:24:00] would say If you're on audible, it's a little tough because his voice is really abrasive. And after the first couple of chapters, you can settle into it, but it's a rough go in the early going, but there's some concepts and things in there that are good and make sense.

[00:24:11] Speaker 2: I would say those are probably the. The two that I would have to lean on, but if I'm going to plug any book. So my good friend, Ian, who, it's by a guy named Oliver Berkman. It's called, I always say the number wrong. I'm pretty sure it's 4, 000 hours. Mortals guide to time management.

[00:24:28] Speaker 2: And it's a little [00:24:30] bit philosophical, but it's all about making decisions based on what's important, right? Anytime you decide to say yes, it's also a decision to say no to something else. And really. Knowing and understanding what's important to you in your life and where you want to go and what you want that to be and how that can be a guiding light towards your decision making, which again, is time management, right?

[00:24:51] Speaker 2: A yes to something is a no to something else. And really getting a good introspective look at that incredible book. That's my favorite. [00:25:00]

[00:25:00] Speaker: Okay. And why I, did Ian recommends it? Ian wrote it.

[00:25:04] Speaker 2: No, I recommended it to me. Ion's always, Ion's got, he's always recommending something, but yes, Ion's a voracious reader.

[00:25:13] Speaker 2: Like he's ridiculous.

[00:25:14] Speaker: Oh, I didn't know that. What's missing. I will say in the world that they're a really good book club. That's not if you type in book club online, you'll get this there. It's an agency sales tool for this company for sure. But it's crap. It looks like it's from the eighties.

[00:25:27] Speaker: But yeah, who doesn't love [00:25:30] good books? Books. Oh, we have, hello Gwen. We're talking agency sales today. Thanks for joining us. It's almost over though. We're out of here in a minute, but I do want to give Darby a minute to say where to go if people are looking for agency sales or learning more about what you do and how to get in touch with you.

[00:25:50] Speaker 2: Absolutely. So agency360. com is the website, all kinds of stuff there, all kinds of cool lead magnets, things that can help you right now, if you want some help, [00:26:00] there's a great budget buster that I'd highly recommend helping you get the client's budget. Every time we've had so many people tell us how helpful that's been

[00:26:08] Speaker: to them.

[00:26:08] Speaker: I want that. I

[00:26:09] Speaker 2: recommend that. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm not a huge You're not there all the time. Is that what you're saying there? I'm there all the time, but I'm just, I don't know. I post infrequently but lurker. Yeah, I am very much a lurker. Effectively there or any, there's just reach out if, and again we're a helpful resource.

[00:26:29] Speaker 2: We try to [00:26:30] be helpful as, as much as we can. We're not really, and we're interested in selling shit. Don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, if we can help you just I'll jump on a call and help anybody anytime with asking zero in return.

[00:26:42] Speaker: One of the reasons we did our course, so we have we have our mastermind in our course and we ended up giving away half of our course to help the people that couldn't afford to work with us.

[00:26:53] Speaker: And that was another agency win for you guys because that was because of, that was actually because of Mark. In the [00:27:00] group. Gwen is saying she's just working on some stuff. She'll be back in a bit. Yes. Come back. Watch it. Watch this. If you want to learn about sales, Gwen, cause Darby's a rock star.

[00:27:09] Speaker: I believe next week, do I need Darby? So every week I ask whoever's on here, what's the topic for next week? And I guess you're not going to know that. So our topic for June's talk. It's June 6th. Okay. Next week we're talking about interest ads on Facebook [00:27:30] versus exposure ads on Google. So if you are looking to learn about ads and what you should do for your business or what you should try in your marketing join us and we'll see you next time.

[00:27:41] Speaker: Thank you so much, Darby.

[00:27:42] Speaker 2: Thank you. It was awesome.

[00:27:44] Speaker: All right. Bye everybody.

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:00:30] Evolution of Streaming Services and Advertising

[00:01:00] Impact of AI and Market Trends on Advertising

[00:04:00] Advertising Tactics and Platform Updates

[00:08:00] Security Concerns in Digital Marketing

[00:10:00] Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode

[00:25:30] Sign-off

[00:00:00] Hello, we're here to do geek speak. This month in the world of marketing, search, social and websites. I included AI cause that's always a topic of conversation. Let's do the round Robin. I'm Pip my name is Phelan. I work with Pip at Seymour Digital Media. I'm Seymour from Little Works India Media. And I'm Just Greg. There's no Just Greg. Why are we just Gregging? Are we just Gregging? He didn't win the survivor pool, people. That's what I just [00:00:30] heard.

[00:00:30] Anyway, we are talking about all great things. Great things, search social websites, and I'm going to let Seymour kick it off today because I see she left some good notes. It's going to be a good conversation. Cause we're getting, going to get right into it. All right. So I think the first interesting thing is that Netflix is opening up an ads platform part of their system so that you can you're going to view ads.

[00:00:53] So I guess they're doing the Prime thing. Prime did that a few months ago. And So did someone [00:01:00] weigh in heavily to add to that? Yeah, I totally really wanted to weigh in because Google did their monthly marketing thing. And one of the things was the ads on TV, more ads on TV. Which is interesting.

[00:01:16] So where are they buying? I wonder, I want to know where they're buying their data from. Disney. They're going to get some search from Disney. I saw that. I thought that was pretty interesting. But anyway, okay. So we [00:01:30] got any other feedback y'all want to jump in on this? Netflix has been turning itself slowly into TV for the last few years ever since interest rates went up.

[00:01:38] They had to, yeah. So yeah, you want to weigh in, which is different than just stating what's new. It's annoying because they disrupted and this is the whole problem with disruptors. They come in with their venture capital backed money and then they ruined the industry. And then they turned their industry into the same industry that it was ripped off of.

[00:01:58] They just become, [00:02:00] they become the mainstream and that's also, hold on. So we had fragmentation, which led to democratization slightly of. Did it? No, it got rid of Blockbuster and we all had late fees, so we're all thankful. No, Blockbuster wasn't the competition that they were going in to disrupt, I don't think.

[00:02:22] I think they were actually going in to disrupt the television and production companies. [00:02:30] Oh, interesting. They've done a fine job. In California, someone was saying that one of the divisions of the union was Telling people not to even bother applying because there aren't enough jobs for their members.

[00:02:44] So it's, it really is because they're not using, the, yeah. So anyways, I find it really just. Pointing quite frankly, because this is, first of all, this is not, I saw the interesting aspects of of disrupting the [00:03:00] industry pip like you. I was pretty excited about some of the aspects.

[00:03:03] However, how it plays out it's just always contingent on the economic systems that we have. So in the end, it always plays out in the similar ways. Like it's just repeating similar. The shitty parts of, and I just, I'm disappointed that this is the direction that they're going in.

[00:03:19] They couldn't find another solution. Maybe they will maybe out of it. Ads seem to take over things. There's a, ads, now make the world run more [00:03:30] so anyway, they can get into your life. Product placement's a big thing, right? That's the reason I think Influencers are in the know now and people, I don't even know what's going on with the influencer market actually.

[00:03:41] Way more interesting. That's not to me. That's way more interesting product placement. I'm all for, I love product placement. I think it's fun to figure out the product placement within movies and TV shows, but ads are something totally different. That was the thing that I didn't want to pay for television.

[00:03:56] So I could sit and watch ads every 10 minutes. That's [00:04:00] not what I'm interested in doing. And now I'm going to go back to getting cable, what do they call it? Now? You can't even record. What is it called? What do they call it? I don't know what they call it. You record the show and then you. You fast forward Oh, PVR, wasn't that a PVR?

[00:04:14] DV DVR. Yeah, DVR, whatever it's called. I think that's that's where I'm headed back, because I don't particularly enjoy. And now it's like a benefit when Prime tells me that after I'm going to see these ads, I can [00:04:30] watch the whole video without any ads. Have you noticed that on Prime?

[00:04:34] But if you watch television, you get an ad about every 15 minutes or so. Interesting. Yeah, they do time it out. I we had special streaming and it's not working right now, but I am on Netflix, but I'm wondering where they will place the ads. I find it interesting. They sell you radio or they sell you Google home now.

[00:04:52] And if you don't want radio or like ads, just. Buy YouTube stuff. It's just [00:05:00] instead of having free radio where the ads are paying for the radio station. Another thing about ads is that it has to be actually done well. And so what happens with North American television is that they adhere to a certain advertising cadence.

[00:05:14] So they're going to do so much. So of the show, they're not going to have anything exciting. And then they're going to have an ad, but if you watch American television in Europe, for example, they're on a different sequence of, yeah. What ends up happening is it'll just stop in the middle, like in the [00:05:30] middle of something that's happening that it's not at a natural arc in the story, stop in the middle of something that's happening.

[00:05:36] And then there's the ad and it just blows you over. So it's as an inside television is one of my things that I love to notice. I thought it was free when you pay for Prime. Now it's just they've segmented yeah, now you don't, it's not like BBC or I don't know. It's a lot. It's a lot.

[00:05:54] I understand. I'm thinking they're not going to have in video ads, but they're going to [00:06:00] have, yeah, it's, they're going to do exactly what Prime's done. They're not going to do anything different. I don't think. Because they're going to copy each other, one of them launches it, they try it out, they see if people will suck it up, and then the other platforms follow through.

[00:06:11] One thing to follow is, if you look at market share, so back in the day when Google ads started, Amazon had bought like a tiny piece of the market share for TV, and every year it bought a little bit more. And so that tells you that they, they have Prime, which [00:06:30] is, don't you have Prime if you get, get delivery?

[00:06:33] Is that what's, you get the Prime delivery and then you get the extra TV stuff? That's correct. But yes, that's correct. But now it comes with the app. Oh yeah, they're in there. So what there's a class action lawsuit in the States that's happening right now, because when we signed up for prime television was supposed to be an, a paid add on.

[00:06:53] Having them add the television in is not in accordance to whatever contract we signed. We [00:07:00] click yes to when we sign up for it for Amazon prime. And so there's a class action lawsuit about it. I think Netflix, I don't know what Netflix is I don't know how it'll Netflix or if they'll have to do the same thing, but I guess they figure the payouts going to be worth it in the end, which it probably is.

[00:07:16] In the end, and this is just a segment of advertising because, the search social and websites, they aren't going to go away, and I don't know if we'll have TV in, I guess we do now, have video on websites and stuff, but we don't need to pay [00:07:30] attention to the TV stuff, let's talk about fun stuff I was gonna say, as a seg , what I was gonna say as a segue to this, is that these ad placements are definitely gonna be a part of the Google Ads portfolio because they already are doing it for other TV platforms.

[00:07:44] Yes. And so I think that it's just gonna build further that it, they're just gonna integrate it in with the existing ads. Like Facebook and Google, and of course Google had their big I. O. this week where they had a big, a lot of announcements. A lot of them focused around Performance [00:08:00] Macs and AI.

[00:08:01] Those are like the two, if I was going to give like the Kohl's, like the quick and fast is that they're pushing for more performance max. It's going to have more AI in it. And supposedly they're going to have better reporting on performance max, which is definitely the shortcoming of using it as a tool is you don't really have enough insights to be like, do this, don't do that.

[00:08:20] Or, I'm showing up a lot of these placements. I don't want to show up there, that kind of thing inside. Is performance max what runs when I'm looking at Google [00:08:30] Analytics for my end? Is that the cross platform category? It can be. So it does. Yeah, it's one of many. This is why setting up UTM parameters and you're tracking URLs is going to be more valuable with performance max.

[00:08:43] The one thing, So cross to cross network is display, like this is a shorthand, but performance max incorporates display. And so that's why. On Linux, you get two separate categories, display and cross platform. And my [00:09:00] understanding when I look at the I, It says that's where where other platforms might be buying into Google ad space or where Google ads are buying into other platforms.

[00:09:10] That was my understanding of that is I've got Google ads. Google ads has two distinct platforms search and display is the display network, which is which can hold CBC, CSS, global, blah, blah, blah, every website in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, [00:09:30] right? That's so that's that. So that's where the Facebook can fall in there.

[00:09:34] And like you can do different types of display type of ads. So that's where P max is falling. And did that make it make more sense? Can I ask in your next in your next course session. Yeah. I'd say just as a quick hand, what I, when you see cross network, it's a website that is part of the Google display network.

[00:09:57] So why do they have two categories in [00:10:00] Google analytics? Is it just. Is it separated in some way? I don't understand why, but that's display are separated. Yeah. No, hold on. There's a display and cross network that show up and those are category groupings that are done automatically by Google.

[00:10:14] So you'd have to go into the Google because they have, they'll let you know how they separate it. I can't. It's a Google Ads. Yeah, in the audience. No, Google Analytics. Into Google Analytics. Oh, okay. It's a grouping category that is set in the settings, and you have to go in [00:10:30] there, and it'll let you know how they've organized them.

[00:10:33] Oh, there's a second page. Okay. Cause I've never found that. I've only found the definition for what they're saying. Cross platform is okay. Anyways, we should probably move along because now we're getting right into the middle of it and we haven't finished everything. We're not even close. Close.

[00:10:48] We're close. Okay. Let's talk what we got Seymour, I think you got some things on Instagram. What's going on there. Greg, what's going on with websites? Not a whole lot for web related stuff since the [00:11:00] last release of WordPress. There's been some security releases for it. But one thing of note that came up a little bit ago was a very commonly used feature on many hosts called, it's called Lightspeed.

[00:11:16] And there's a specific caching plugin to use on Lightspeed servers, if you're hosting is a Lightspeed server that has an exploit in it where hackers had been [00:11:30] targeting. Unpatched plugins and able to gain administrative rights to your site and basically be able to do whatever they felt like.

[00:11:42] That was pretty major for, because Lightspeed is a very common application that many hosting servers are set up with. So if you're running a Lightspeed server. Definitely check if you're using the Lightspeed Cache plugin and make sure it's [00:12:00] updated. That that could have affected a lot of people, right?

[00:12:05] How would people figure out if they're on that, they'd call their web dev, and if they don't have a web dev, what, they're looking for a certain plugin they have? Their hosting would be Lightspeed Hosting. And they would need to be using the Lightspeed Cache plug in to optimize their site and have caching capabilities on their site.[00:12:30]

[00:12:30] If they're not using that plug in, then it's not an issue. You can still be on a Lightspeed server and be fine. It's because of this Lightspeed Cache plug in. To optimize on a lightspeed server, if you are using that is what has the exploit in it. So sounds like a bad day for some people. Nobody wants to give up administrator rights to their site.

[00:12:57] [00:13:00] Yeah, that could be just bad. But wow. Wow. Okay. On another note of fun hacking cause it sounds do we had here on the West coast, the London drugs, right? Which got hacked. I think I saw something on the news yesterday about that. And I know it doesn't seem like that's part of, this month in the world of marketing, but technically it kinda is.

[00:13:23] Because it's letting you, yeah, it reminds you that security is a big issue and you got to keep on top of it and you don't want to [00:13:30] have your systems hacked because you don't want to be a giant, whether you're a giant company or a little one, hacking and ransomware is more prevalent than it's ever been because of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because it makes it easy for you to hold something hostage on a website, not even be nearby and get money.

[00:13:48] It's, yeah it's annoying that we're at best and libelous, like you, you could be liable for your data that's That's that's taken to the other thing. And so that's the other thing you want to [00:14:00] work with a company that has errors and emissions insurance, liability insurance.

[00:14:05] And I've just been talking to quite a few people and nobody asks their marketers that. It's super, yeah, it's super important to have that. It, and if you're a marketer, you need to get that. It doesn't cost that much for the year and it's so worth it because if you have any problems, then you're not caught.

[00:14:22] And you're not in trouble. Yeah, you have to if you're incorporated, you have to have that in your insurance, right? So [00:14:30] I think I have no idea. All I know is that I'm not incorporated, but I do have it. So yeah, that's good. And then Oh, and then we have some so we have some lighter news on an upbeat thing.

[00:14:42] What about x becoming x Oh, yeah. That was fun. I still can't get it. I can't, I guess it doesn't automatically forward, but you can now go to x. com and it is Twitter. They're not automatically forwarding. [00:15:00] Twitter. com 2x. com as of yet. Yeah. But that's pretty exciting. I want to know, how do they do that?

[00:15:07] Just from a technical perspective, how do they have both the platform, the tweets running on both URLs? That's so exciting to me. Yeah. Yeah. To be able to have the same site at multiple domains. I'm just thinking you're geeky, just so you know. But when you make a post on one, how does it get transferred to the other?

[00:15:28] Twitter. com. Yeah. Aren't they [00:15:30] running You're just at a different URL. But the URL, the way the DNS is always structured, you have to have one as the top level domain. One always has to be the dominant. Okay, I see. So it's not forwarded, but it's but they're connected. Okay. All right.

[00:15:43] Then that's not as exciting as I thought. And then we have, so You did catch on the right thing that's weird is if you're not, because you always should be forced to either go to Twitter or X. One or the other has to be the top level one. So you can't have two top level ones unless you're running two instances of the same [00:16:00] website.

[00:16:00] Then you have to run two backup, like you'd have to be backing and cross referencing. So it seems like it would be a lot of work to do that, that they wouldn't want to do. But regardless, I think that's quite fun to have X. com. And then what are they going to just keep Twitter? Which country was it that they can't have X, X.

[00:16:17] com? I forgot. Japan. They can't. X is a got a copyright from a band. There's a very popular band there that is called X. And so they don't have, they don't have the copyright in Japan. Do [00:16:30] you think they'll keep Twitter. com in Japan then? Most, most likely, that's my suspicions.

[00:16:35] They would keep it because apparently Japanese corporations are quite litigious, especially around copyright. And so they're not afraid to see you in Japan if you do that. So I would suspect that probably they, they would keep it as Twitter. That's my guess. Exciting news. If he owns the domain, X.

[00:16:56] The copyright would be only on the game? It's [00:17:00] calling your b the way I heard it explained is that, the copyright, It's a rep, you're representing yourself, the business, as a copywritten name, so you're not allowed to represent yourself as that. Wouldn't be able to have any Even though you own it, and they're not legally trying to take X.

[00:17:17] com away from him. He just can't. Yeah. Cause so you don't own a domain you lease it. No one owns a domain. They're all owned by ICANN and then you buy a lease from them. That's, and so the lease is still for ICANN and ICANN doesn't [00:17:30] want to get sued. So they would say that it's null and void.

[00:17:33] And so if that's my understanding on it. I'm not like an international. That's interesting, isn't it? Cause this deals with international marketing and Yeah. So there's different regulations rules that we're not going to get into. Let's talk about other things that are related to this. How I was speaking of lawsuits, tick tock.

[00:17:51] I was thinking tick tock. It would match a better segue. Oh, what was your segue? Damn. Speaking of lawsuits open AI is [00:18:00] being sued by Scarlett Johansson because they decided to go ahead and. Use her likeness in a voice voice system eh, because after she had refused and then, and the only reason why she's allowed to do something after she's refused it, that is the worst business decision I've ever heard of.

[00:18:20] And posted. Oh, it's so much worse. Yeah. The only reason why the lawsuit can go ahead in the first place is because Sam Altman decided to [00:18:30] when he announced it, he posted a link to the demo and it only had one word, which was her, which is a reference to the 2013 Scarlett Johansson movie where it's her voice is an automated system.

[00:18:39] all he had to write was her and that's what he wrote. And now he's in trouble. Sam is always in trouble. Yeah. Oh oh, we got, how does everybody feel about screaming frog from Shea Lynn? And open AI integration into API. Yeah. I have a [00:19:00] lot of feelings about this Screaming Frog. I want to go play with more.

[00:19:05] I, yeah, I didn't know OpenAI was integrating with their API. Does that mean everything we put in Screaming Frog they get? Yeah. And they sell Google ads. Did you know that? Screaming Frog has Google ads as a service. I did not know that, but I guess it's out there number one service. They're a good service.

[00:19:26] They're an agency. They're like, at the end of the day, much like [00:19:30] Whitepar it does like a bunch of SaaS products that are still in a local SEO agency. That's a really good question. Shaylin. I don't know how I feel. They gave away Reddit gave away everybody's information, right? Google originated because Yellow Pages really gave away their information.

[00:19:46] So I think it'll make some big changes happen quicker. They sold it. They didn't just. Handed over. They got a print Reddit they got paid for giving away their data. So giving away people's data, [00:20:00] cause everybody was a volunteer who was in there and make it. Yeah, but I, that's what you get for just chatting and giving away your time, I don't know. It's hard. That's hard. It's such a good question. It's coming. It's going to take over and we got to figure it out as we go. Because what I saw from the Google Ads AI, like the marketing I have a client who's got a product and I can't get any pictures and it's going to make it so I can take that picture and just put it in any background, right?

[00:20:27] So I think with [00:20:30] AI changes and stuff like that, we're just going to have to learn to work with it. It's very life changing what's happening right now. We're just at the very beginning, right? So I think we all gotta, Keep learning and doing and paying attention to all of this. That's what do you think?

[00:20:44] What do you guys think?

[00:20:46] Don't all talk at once. Now. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not that familiar with screaming frog. So that's not really a space for me. But from what I've read there's a lot of data that's been scraped. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And of [00:21:00] course, that's how Open AI works. That's the whole thing.

[00:21:03] I still have the same feelings that I have about it in general, where it's like all the people that are actually writing great content and doing great things on the internet, their work is now devalued in my mind. And it's going to be a lot harder to create or, and to find original work with a plethora of Iterations of the same thing.

[00:21:24] We already had problems with that where people were scraping other people's work and creating iterations. And [00:21:30] it's just I don't know. I don't think that's, I don't know. That's not the kind of internet that I actually want to see. To be honest, from what I'm seeing out there, and maybe this will change, but cause I'm using, I've been playing with the system that does AI with Google search and.

[00:21:48] The factual the insights it gives are interesting and quite accurate. If it followed from material that was sourced correctly, because it's [00:22:00] just pulling a line from here that it thinks makes sense, but it's reference, referencing it wrong. So I think that there, the language models still have a long way to go and I think we could maybe gain some insights, but I think that the human is very needed in every element to make it work properly because machines run themselves into walls.

[00:22:22] I've done it. Humans, they'll try to move. If they hit a wall once they will move aside. This reminds me, I just [00:22:30] watched a tick talk yesterday about the, because there's an app. I don't know if it's like an, Open AI specific app or not, but people have the, have it on their phones and you can just talk to your phone and AI will answer you and you can have a conversation.

[00:22:47] They took two phones and activated it. And so the two AIs were just talking back and forth to each other from phone to phone and having a conversation, but that would go on. [00:23:00] Forever. That conversation would never stop if those two AIs just kept on talking back and forth to each other. It's true. It is true.

[00:23:10] But isn't, it isn't, it is interesting how many of us are using ChatGPT and being like, it's like asking a friend a question that, That seems to know a lot more than you, I don't know, I'm shoving things at it learning. So it's such an interesting topic. I think that if I want to put that I use AI on my website.

[00:23:28] So I think that's the [00:23:30] direction I'm going in with it. Not that it might be the best direction. And I would say, I hope you're going to be more specific than just that.

[00:23:40] I would say that yeah. Sorry. I was just gonna say that with Screaming Frog and Open ai, I think that it's not necessarily a bad thing 'cause it doesn't really scan the on-page content other than to find a word count. It's mostly around s SDO related things like your page shuttles, meta descriptions.

[00:23:54] And that's where Open AI does reasonably well. And it's not too bad where it's doing regressive [00:24:00] searches Oh. For data. So I don't, I think that. It'll be fine to point out like a, maybe like a plan of Hey, you've got X number of things like this. I would start here. And so it's more. Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:24:14] So it looks like the Screaming Frog integration is mostly about organizing titles and meta tags and things like that. I just took a brief, very brief cursory look while I can listen and read at the same time. And so I think in that case, that might actually speed things up a whole lot. [00:24:30] But are they giving the same answer to everybody else?

[00:24:32] I don't know because every SEO person is slightly different of what they're going to want. And even if you use the AI, you have to be very specific. As I said, you have to work with it. Can it help you? You're still going to have to adjust it because it's not, you want a sales copywriter in with your meta descriptions, titles, URLs, and you also want an SEO writer, right?

[00:24:56] And then you might want somebody with some skills from Google Ads that [00:25:00] understands things about title case and sentence case and, yeah. So I think that to get the perfect thing, you'll, it'll, you'll have to wiggle with it. And speaking of wiggle, we're going to wiggle out of here. Yeah, that was a terrible segue.

[00:25:12] But I do want to dance the afternoon away singing songs while I work, because I think today's going to be A great day, and I hope it's a great day for you all. Y'all know what we're doing next week? Do we know? Okay. Next week we have a special guest. So I'm very excited to bring a friend of mine in named [00:25:30] Darby and we're going to be talking about sales.

[00:25:32] So if you want to learn anything about sales, you should join. This guy is so good at what he does. He works with Jason Swank and who had a mastermind that we were in a while ago, but he's a person I'd like to call a friend. So I hope you all can join because it's going to be really fun. And I think we're out of here.

[00:25:50] Bye guys. Bye. Everyone

00:00 - Introduction to Google Tag Manager
01:06 - Ease of use for non-developers
03:00 - Creative marketing uses of Google Tag Manager
06:00 - Integrating Tag Manager with e-commerce
10:00 - Managing complex setups in Google Tag Manager
20:30 - Upcoming workshops and learning opportunities

[00:00:00] Today we're talking about Tag Manager and I'm here and this guy's here, Phelan. Phelan, and we're with Seymour Digital Media. And this is mostly your topic, Phelan, because this is your specialty.

[00:00:11] Yeah. Yeah, talking about Tag Manager and why you should be using it. So one of the big ones is, what is it? I guess is the first part. Yeah, it is. That is the first question. What is it? Yeah. And so it's a no code solution. So it doesn't, you don't, It doesn't require any special skills to really use.

[00:00:29] And what it [00:00:30] does is it deploys like your marketing tags, right? So your Facebook pixel, your LinkedIn pixel Google analytics, and you can also set up the most important feature I find is that you can also do, that's how you can do events for your Google analytics. And you're muted.

[00:00:46] If you were going to do a comparison, like if you were going to describe Tag Manager to someone, I know you're loving this from me, how would you describe it to somebody that doesn't know why or [00:01:00] what or how, or anything like that? They just know there's this thing called Tag Manager and why do I have to, why should I be using it?

[00:01:06] Why is it the best recommendation to use? First of all, it's free. That's a big one. Also once it's installed by your web dev or whatever, you never have to ask your web dev to add code. It's super simple platform for making, if I want to start tracking certain things, I don't have to talk to a web developer at all.

[00:01:25] I can just do it all. Is that true? Because you're like, we get hired to [00:01:30] do this. So I'm not often going into Tag Manager and you are in fact, a developer. So tell me, is it easy enough for a layman to use? Yes. Yeah. It actually is. It's you'll need to, it'll, there's a bit of a learning curve on like the hardest part is not how to use it.

[00:01:48] It's to think up the scenario in which you would be using it. Okay. Tell me more. Tell me more. So for example, you want to set up a Google analytics [00:02:00] event that triggers when a page loads, that's the thank you page. Okay. So it's not, the harder part is not. So much like the actual implementation, it's pretty easy, relatively easy.

[00:02:13] The harder part is like thinking up like, Oh, I want this event to trigger because of this specific thing. It's more thinking up the use case, I think it's the harder part that most people will, that I struggled with at the start. Now that I've gotten by sea legs with it, it's relatively easy for me to do.

[00:02:29] [00:02:30] But I think the harder, hardest part for people is just figuring out like, Oh, I want, How do I want to use this? How do I, what events do I want to capture? You, another fun one as well. We've had it where there's like specific pop ups for specific pages. So there could be, any blog post that says that Any URL that contains the word SEO, I want my SEO giveaway pop up to show up there.

[00:02:56] Yeah, so you could set it up where it's like, because we [00:03:00] don't have those pop ups ready. Oh yeah. It's true. It's true. We're not usually part of the pop up family though. Yeah, but those are some fun use cases where you can split out I have a a giveaway that's specific to this topic.

[00:03:13] Anytime I write about it, I want the pop up to show up only for those pages because it's relevant to if you showed up there that you might want to get it downloadable. And so that's a way that you can think about how to use tag manager because page, if you have any time, you have contains a super powerful one [00:03:30] of a condition, right?

[00:03:31] So the URL contains SEO. And so that means that you don't have to do every different use every different URL. It's just as long as that word SEO is in there. Then I want this pop up to show up. And the chiropractor, say, like if you just wanted like the, a chiropractor keyword or like a physiotherapy, like keyword in it, could you make something trigger if that was the thing on the page?

[00:03:55] That's what I'm trying to say. If there's a page and it has like chiropractor on it or [00:04:00] another page has physiotherapist on it, like you could make it so the pop up only shows up on that page. Yes. Yeah, but it's specifically the URL. You want to make it so it's the URL contains a certain word. So that's going to be easier.

[00:04:15] You can do it where it is stuff that's on the page, but that gets way more complicated. It's I've done it for a couple of them where it's when you see the little text that pops up, if you filled out the form and then it's like, [00:04:30] Oh, we had it set up where that was the trigger. And so like on a Shopify form, it would say thank you.

[00:04:35] Instead of redirecting to a thank you page. And so we had to track that little visible element. We did it. It was a lot more complicated that I wouldn't recommend going that route. Doing the URL is actually, I would say, relatively easy for most people to set up. Okay. And with, so what kind of things would you recommend for using Tag Manager?

[00:04:56] Like I, I know it, for, for what I know and how I [00:05:00] speak to it, it helps people with their data driven journey, right? Like you're, so if you're really, interested in doing the right things for your website and what's under the hood. You use tag manager because it gives you more control, like how you'd get maybe a WordPress site over something else because you have more control.

[00:05:19] Is that correct? Yeah. And it's also makes it easier to find it all in one place. It also makes it easier because you don't have to go into the head code. So anytime, [00:05:30] any sort of marketing platform says, Hey, add this code to the head tag. You add it into Tag Manager, that way you have it all in one central location and you can tell which tags you have and how they're set up.

[00:05:40] That'll make your life a lot easier. Aura's asking, can you use Tag Manager with a third party checkout? That is a great question. Let's talk about it. Yeah, so it would depend on who's the, who's the third party. It's depends on what they give you access to.

[00:05:56] So Aura's asking, if I put Tag Manager in, I [00:06:00] won't have to add to the head, header on my website. Just to also clarify, just cause it's, header is like your menu.

[00:06:07] Menu at the top, but like the head code just head, not header. Then yes you would be, that just substitutes all that for you. And it's just go, you go to tech manager and anytime it says add this to the head code to start tracking. Just add it to tag manager. And then if it's something like, I don't know, like a Google analytics or a LinkedIn pixel, then you just add it on condition as all pages, [00:06:30] just the whole site you want it active because there's no reason why not.

[00:06:33] But yeah, it's basically a substitute for doing all that and it makes it a lot easier for you to have full control over it. Also to there's cool stuff as well. We have to put it in the head and the body for tag manager, right? So it's just one tag. And I think Google's changed the name of its tag.

[00:06:51] So it's they're trying to help be less confusing, but it's causing more confusion initially, I think. Yeah. So they've changed it. What are the Google analytics [00:07:00] one? It's like a Google tag. It's a really annoying name change that they didn't really. clarify with the community why they changed it or what, why it just seems really stupid in my opinion of like, why would they switch over to that?

[00:07:12] Oh also, hey, now hey, now, no, I really like that. They've changed the name, like key events from conversions. No, it doesn't change on the reporting. So it's weird. However key events makes more sense logically. So I do appreciate them trying. Let's not let's, We don't know.

[00:07:28] We're not them. I was talking [00:07:30] more about the, just the tag manager stuff is there wasn't any announcement about it. There wasn't any documentation. They just did it. And the documentation is also poorly worded, so it's very confusing very quickly. But circling back, we didn't actually answer Aura's first question, which was about the adding tag manager to third party.

[00:07:50] So the biggest one you can do it. The biggest issue you're going to run into is if you have anything with like e commerce functionality it's really complicated for [00:08:00] you to set up on your own It's easier to use whoever's the e commerce they usually have a put in your google analytics and they spit events back to your google analytics for you so you don't really need it as much.

[00:08:11] Generally, yeah, you try just for simplicity's sake like i've tried to set up like a You e commerce event tracking myself. And that was complicated. I know I had to like actually write JavaScript to make it work and it was not recommended. So use the out of the box solution. If you can't, [00:08:30] what does that mean?

[00:08:32] Out of so for instance let's give an example. I use teachable. Or as my teaching thing, and it has a, I can go through a checkout, right? So if I was going to use tag manager, because it gives me more clarity into what's going on through the whole process from, landing on the website to purchase.

[00:08:56] How would I Do that like how would I add [00:09:00] tag manager you think or what would I be looking at? In a situation like that I would actually use their inbuilt if they say hey put in your Google Analytics if there's any sort of e commerce Functionality because it to set it up with tag manager where it is going to be a lot of headache for you because it's very complicated.

[00:09:19] You have to set up event listeners and things like that. And it's, would you would you set up, so why, so you wouldn't use tag manager is what you're saying? Cause you said put in the Google [00:09:30] analytics code. Yeah, so I would separate out the Google analytics from the tag manager. In that case, you could still use tag manager for other like the linkedin or any of these other ones that you might be using other marketing platforms that and that you're doing ads through I would use Tag Manager for those ones because they're really good use case.

[00:09:49] It's just the specific e commerce interaction with Google Analytics is going to be better handled by their systems natively, if they've got that integration. So [00:10:00] would you set up Tag Manager for Shopify? Yes. Cause we, we do that for Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar. That's how I add that to the website.

[00:10:09] And so I, you, I, Oh, so you still add Tag Manager and then you put in other codes besides Google Analytics. Is that what you're saying? Or e commerce. I would separate them out because the e commerce tracking is going to be better done natively than what you would be doing through Tag Manager. Because it's just not [00:10:30] You're going to have much easier time overall with what they natively give you.

[00:10:33] Like I said, you can do it, but the way Tag Manager works is it's, it'll be a lot more headache than it's worth for you to. Do you think it's more important than ever to start to understand how to use Tag Manager as a business owner? Or is it more important and easier just to hire somebody to set it up for you?

[00:10:54] I think it depends on a couple of factors on the per, for the person. So I think I don't know what's [00:11:00] happened. I'm frozen. Yeah.

[00:11:03] Hello, everybody. I'm here. Strange. Hi. Oh, there's a question. Damn. I wish my camera was working. I'm going to turn my camera off and just ask you questions. I think Phelan. Cause it's good. Yeah. Yeah. So Steven's asking what are the best practices for managing complex Google Tag Manager setups with many tags and many triggers?

[00:11:23] So there's a variety of things you could do. It also depends on your team because there's different permissions. [00:11:30] So you could actually have a junior person set things up, but they don't have the permissions to actually hit publish. And what you could do is have like your junior junior marketing people set up the tags and then they are unable to publish until the, the admin approves it.

[00:11:45] I feel like I look like I'm ill. The choices are endless. The choices are endless. Ah, okay. We're just gonna there you go. So Okay, that's, I don't like that one. Okay, so the other thing to keep in [00:12:00] mind is you can also have a version history. So one good thing that they had that they took from the coding community is you can see each version of the tag manager setup.

[00:12:09] And so if something breaks, you can go back and be like, Oh, what changed between this one and this one that caused it to break? And so you can both use the version history as well as the approval process to help with any sort of check, checking issues and also figure out where there were changes.

[00:12:25] I do think tag manager can be very [00:12:30] confusing. Stephen saying it makes sense. To the right. Yeah. Junior people. Can get lost. I, I definitely want to defer to a developer when I'm using tag manager if I can, so I can do my specialty. But and as we dig deeper into tag manager, we learn that it's, it is in depth and it's good to have a developer on team that can help.

[00:12:56] Yeah. Yeah, to answer this ties back to the other question we had [00:13:00] before the screen got frozen about was it, would it be recommended to do it? I think that it is more, I think the, for me, it's a function of how tech savvy the business owner is. If they're a little bit, like they can, they're comfortable getting around their WordPress website and comfortable with adding stuff to the head code to begin with I think that's that would be a good spot for someone to be To learn more about tech manager how they could do it Especially if they're doing their own marketing and they have [00:13:30] a pretty good idea on like how to use It's definitely not for beginners.

[00:13:33] I would count it as like an intermediate to and It's intermediate to start and then it leads all the way to you can be super advanced with it. But it's really exciting. It is really exciting. Like we have a client and they, they don't sell direct to the customer. And so we have to figure out a way to track what we're going to consider a conversion.

[00:13:57] So a primary action that we, a key event that we want to [00:14:00] monitor for a sale. And then. Also monitor a secondary action that are people taking the secondary action and I think that gives just so much more data on a not individual level at all, but as a group of what people do. So yeah.

[00:14:18] I would say that actually is a really good example of what are the cool things you could do with tag manager. So we have a Google analytics event, meaning like it gets sent as an event and it has all these parameters. One of the [00:14:30] parameters that we wanted to track was so they have multiple retailers that they work with.

[00:14:34] So we needed to track if they go and find those retailers and we send traffic to their website, we would need her to identify the dynamically their URL. Say they click on Bob's burgers versus Joey's hot dogs. We wanted to track each one of those URLs separately, but still have the event called external link.

[00:14:55] And so that's something you could do by having an additional parameter to that event, which is [00:15:00] the URL. And then we just dynamically is what, what was clicked on. We want to know that URL that was clicked on and we can do that with tech manager. And so with a little bit of extra knowledge there it means that we can help our client show to all the retailers, Hey, I sent you 20 people last week to your website.

[00:15:19] And so that's, I'm nodding.

[00:15:21] So that's a way that we can really dynamically. So we're not having to track each individual URL. We could just say anytime that this URL is not [00:15:30] of the website, but it's going external. I want to know what that one is. And so we can swap that over. And so it's just a little snippet that we do in Google tag manager.

[00:15:39] And then that means that we. Saved ourselves a ton of time and a ton of work. And so let me ask, so when we, can we use tag manager? Can we put tags in from TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and like our, do we have to be advertisers to put those tags in? And should we put [00:16:00] those tags in?

[00:16:01] Do, does everybody have a tag? You mentioned Microsoft Clarity. Can you expand on that? Yeah. So there's there's. An absolute ton of natively built in because there might be certain parameters for, certain people's tags where you got to put in I don't know, like a API key and and the name of your account.

[00:16:20] So sometimes they have to build those ones. There's also a whole community tab as well. Then in the top right corner, you'll see that there's like community and people have built their own. To fill in some [00:16:30] of the gaps. The other thing is there's also just a custom HTML, which I use for the Microsoft Clarity.

[00:16:35] So it could be anything. The sky's the limit for you there. Because generally when you add stuff to the head, a head tag, it's usually like some sort of script. And so you just pop it into the custom HTML and just make sure you name it like Microsoft Clarity, wherever. So really you. You're, and why would you add Microsoft?

[00:16:53] So I could do that for any of the socials to try to track something organically. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you could, [00:17:00] yeah. Any of them. The only one I would not do because is the Facebook pixel because of it doesn't, because it would be loading third party. It's very limited. So you wanna make sure that you're doing the conversion.

[00:17:12] API when at all possible with Facebook.

[00:17:16] What does that mean? We should be doing? So you should use say you're on Shopify. They have a native integration with Meta that I would definitely go through there because the way it works is that The pixels limited if it loads in [00:17:30] third party, but if the Facebook pixel loads with the website from the backend that's considered first party.

[00:17:36] And so you're all good. You don't violate any of the privacy policies. Ooh, okay. So what do we do with Facebook? You want to look for something that loads in the conversion API. So native integration like I said, with Shopify, they have one that directly speaks between. Meta and Shopify, and they just work directly through their own API.

[00:17:57] So what could Jabby have? [00:18:00] Would Kajabi have one? And then you would put the Facebook tag in Kajabi and then say Kajabi would be able to do help us with retargeting. Cause if we do it like that. Oh, and yeah. And so I'm assuming like teachable would be the same or what does one of our clients use?

[00:18:20] It's really interesting. Helps graduates. Oh yeah. So they have a acuity is like for booking. [00:18:30] That's one of their big ones. Yeah. Yeah, it's Acuity. Do they, so what do you think you'd do with that? Is that the same example? Yeah, you would, you'd look for it in their integrations tab or apps tab.

[00:18:42] They usually have some sort of track with Facebook pixel. And so I would go that route. Most of the other ones they, most of the other marketing platforms don't need this because there's just been a lot of issues between meta and all these other operating systems where they don't let them do as much as they used to do.

[00:18:58] So that's the only reason why I single out [00:19:00] meta and Facebook for that. Interesting. Okay. And that makes a lot of sense. And we've seen that change with our Facebook group, for instance, I'm frozen, but also they've changed it. So we can't go live into groups the way we used to. So we might be changing a little bit of what we're doing and how we're sharing into the group in the next little while in the Facebook group, it looks like LinkedIn is working well.

[00:19:23] So that's brilliant. And I think our Facebook business page is working well too. But so [00:19:30] why would you, okay. So you say it's a no code solution. I guess it is a no code solution. But why would you recommend tag manager to your customers or to other marketers? A lot of it stems around. Once it is set up, it's very easy for any person to jump in there and just add tags.

[00:19:52] They don't really it's on. Someone just shows them once it should be. And you have a recording to work off of. It's actually fairly easy. And [00:20:00] I'm. Pretty sure that just about anyone could do it if they're like a little bit. If they're a slightly tech savvy, you know that they would just need to go and add a new tag Add a find out if there's one that's already native one or use the custom html add it Let's say fire on all pages and then publish.

[00:20:16] It's relatively so it's easy to get Set up and easy you might need a little bit of help to get set up if you're not super comfortable But generally once you're, once it's installed, you're pretty much off to the [00:20:30] races. Okay. I am excited about digging into Tag Manager, and I think more into Tag Manager, and I think you've made it so I don't feel as scared about it, and I know I'm gonna jump in there. Now, can I easily break stuff?

[00:20:46] That was a yes. That was a yes. No, if, no, what I would say is it's just not, you can break things, but the good part about it is like I mentioned earlier, you have version history. So if you do publish something and it does break it, you can go back and [00:21:00] it used to work a week ago, go back to that version and then just restore that one.

[00:21:04] Okay. And if I play around, will I get better at it? And then I won't be as fearful. Cause I think maybe some of the fear is just the way of the movements of the screens and stuff. Maybe it's just something we're not used to. It also has a nice preview tool. So you can see preview your website and it'll open up a tab that'll have the tag assistance, which is a Chrome extension that they could either download And so what that does help you with is that you see what tags [00:21:30] fired, what tags didn't fire.

[00:21:31] It's it's pretty easy to debug and be like the tag I thought was going to fire didn't fire. So now you need to go back to the conditions on which you thought it was going to fire and figure out why it didn't. So it's got a lot of debugging tools that are really helpful. It's also doesn't It doesn't, it isn't live until you publish it.

[00:21:48] So it's not, you can play around and have it in a little sandbox, but it's not going to get out into the real world until you tell it to. Ah, okay. Okay. So yeah, I'm excited about Tag Manager. I [00:22:00] think, and we're also teaching we're having a workshop, aren't we, next week about Tag Manager? Is it free?

[00:22:05] We're going to have a workshop. It's going to be free. It will be on our YouTube and LinkedIn. And yeah, it's going to be free. And so it'll be about going over the actual mechanics of setting this stuff up, and so you guys will get to see how I kind of work through the creating a new event tag, and how to debug what's going on or why it didn't work.

[00:22:26] Awesome. That sounds fun. I will join you, and it sounds like I could open up my [00:22:30] own tag manager and try stuff. On that call and maybe ask questions when I'm doing that. So join us on LinkedIn or YouTube next week. And the reason we're using those channels is because it's just better teaching environments we find than the Facebook live, especially because there seems to be a lot of changes with Facebook.

[00:22:49] So join us over there. And next week, if you can't we're doing another thing too. We're doing Geeks Week again, because we do it every Thursday. At 11 the tag [00:23:00] manager class is on the 21st, so it's on a Tuesday at, I believe 1230 for half an hour. So I am sorry about my screen, but on Thursday we're doing geek speak.

[00:23:11] So join us here again and I think it is what in the world, in the month of marketing, and we're talking about search, social and websites and AI and what what's happening in those industries. Yes, we're right on time. We get to go. And you can see my face move now. [00:23:30] Okay. I'll see you guys next time.

[00:23:33] Bye. Bye.

00:00 - Introduction to homepage elements
01:00 - Importance of branding on your homepage
05:00 - Navigation design and user experience
10:00 - Designing an effective hero section
15:00 - Implementing engaging visual content
20:00 - The importance of social proof and testimonials

[00:00:00] This topic we're going to be talking about is key elements. Every website homepage needs. And of course, everybody probably knows I'm Greg McKinnon with original 72 creative, and we're a full service website, graphic design and digital marketing firm. And our guest today is guest co host. I think I did that.

[00:00:22] Team was Rina Liddle from little works, indie media. And with that, I think we should just launch right in.

[00:00:29] Okay. [00:00:30] All right, so we're doing homepage today. So we, every time I was thinking about this topic, I kept moving through all the pages, so we're just gonna try and stick to homepage today. 'cause homepage is a pretty, is the most important. Page of your website, generally speaking. Greg, do you wanna start us off yeah.

[00:00:49] The first thing that is most important for not only your homepage, but the homepage and your overall site is clear branding that people will [00:01:00] recognize that they've gotten to the right place. So your logo, your branding. So that recognition that when people arrive, they know that they've got to the right place, super important all over your website, but most importantly, also on the homepage, because it's typically the first page you get to when you arrive at a site.

[00:01:23] Yeah, and especially if the name of your. Company is fairly generic or there are companies that are doing business with [00:01:30] a similar name. That can actually be confusing. I actually got on one of my other on, not on my little works page, but on another page got an inquiry that was, they were expecting somebody else at the other end, which was pretty interesting when they filled out my form.

[00:01:45] And it was great for me, not so good for the other person Basically, your branding and people's recognition that they're at the right place is super important for any page of your site because people will determine [00:02:00] within that first couple of seconds if they feel like they're at the right place right away.

[00:02:04] So if you, if your branding is off or if they have any hesitation that they might not have gotten to the right place, then they may go back and search for something else or. Or something like that. So it's just critical to, to have that branding on your mat your website match, whatever that visual look of your.

[00:02:26] Of your business is yeah, [00:02:30] absolutely. Now, do you have any be, so I've been building websites for over 20 years and I've put logos on left over the, to the right, I put them in the middle from a branding perspective and your header of your website, because this will lead into navigation, which I was going to go second with.

[00:02:51] Do you feel that instant recognition for people that you would prefer to always see the logo in [00:03:00] one, the left side at the top? Or do you find there's much of a difference for that? I think of it as, the way that we read I, I usually put it on the left, but I've also put the logo on the center.

[00:03:15] Basically. I am not a designer. My designers do that. We typically do left or center. But it really depends on your audience. So if your major target audience is right to left readers. Then you might want to consider sticking [00:03:30] it up on the right. But but in a Western context generally to the left or in the top.

[00:03:35] And it really depends on how it responds in terms of the mobile version. That's also another way. So I'm not so caring so much if it's left or center. I, but I do care greatly as to what does it do when you scroll on your desktop and what does it do when you scroll on your. On your, On your mobile.

[00:03:54] And I don't think that we need to have a logo that follows people. It's usually sometimes [00:04:00] when you scroll, it gets a little smaller in the top left corner, but it might be bigger a little bit when you first land on the page. That's one thing that we've done for some people. And actually it does.

[00:04:09] And now that I think about it, Usually does the whole menu bar stays fairly static. So it does go, but I don't need to have it all throughout. I also don't need to have I like to work with a complimentary color palette from the logo. I always feel like if you're building your site based on your logo colors, that's shows me that you haven't actually [00:04:30] hired somebody to do your site.

[00:04:31] So that's, and those branding colors need to work properly too. And And then I also I like a contrasting colors specifically for the call to action button. That's super important, but now I feel like I'm getting ahead. So should we roll that back? You make good points. And I think as far as the logo, whether it stays small or goes away, I think that's like you, it's always a fight with the client because of the client.

[00:04:59] It's always I want [00:05:00] my logo there and telling them once it's initially there and then you scroll or whatever, like it's not as important because people have already realized, okay, yes, this is where I'm supposed to be. And then after that, showing your logo is really just like further branding I think is the word you're looking for.

[00:05:21] Yeah, every designer will say like the worst comment from a client when giving feedback on a design is make the logo bigger. Do you think the logo [00:05:30] should not be that big? It doesn't need to be that big. If it needs to be bigger, it's usually because It's a long word and it's in this direction. And that's just not very great branding anyways.

[00:05:42] If you, so I would talk to a designer if you're having problems with people seeing your logo. But the other thing is a lot of people are using the wrong file format for their logos and their logos will typically end up looking blurry in comparison to the rest of the font on the site. And so you want to make sure that your [00:06:00] logo is actually crisp and and you may need to have a developer get you the proper size.

[00:06:05] A file to upload because while WordPress will render it to a size that it likes, it's not actually looking to see how sharp your logo is when it puts it in up at that size. Yeah, we shouldn't go too far down the design rabbit hole there, but I could go off and a bunch of stuff with logos.

[00:06:23] So that leads us into a logo placement and branding at the top. My next on the [00:06:30] list of most important things is a clear navigation, well organized. And as you've mentioned, not too cluttered, which I completely agree. Yeah. So when you're relying on WordPress to do the mobile responsiveness for you and you're not designing a separate mobile Home page.

[00:06:50] What ends up happening is your, if you have a lot of dropdown menus and a lot of menus, what will happen is it'll be hidden a little hamburger in the top, right on the [00:07:00] mobile. And then when you click on that, you've got three scroll worth. Yeah. This huge gigantic menu bar that you need to get through.

[00:07:07] So that's not great. But even on desktops, if you've got that there, some sites do require a lot of information, but we definitely don't want to put all the information up on sites and any more like we used to. So you want to get just. enough information to hook the client or the prospect and have them make that call or fill out that form or however it is that you want them to first contact [00:07:30] you.

[00:07:30] And and so you want that navigation to be as minimal as possible to accomplish that. So thinking about your overall number of pages Helps you to keep that menu down minimal. And then if you actually need more pages than that, then you can consider a secondary menu option that can always also be useful.

[00:07:52] Yeah. I think of a lot of the main navigation pages almost as inner landing pages, which [00:08:00] are. Mainly focused on then continuing to direct you to the content and additional pages within that section. And I think people don't really understand that as much and they're like, Oh this page is on my site.

[00:08:15] It needs to be in the menu somewhere and that's not necessarily the case. No, it's, I think of the metaphor that I use the most and sometimes people look at me as if I'm crazy, but I think of, Websites as being three dimensional in the sense that you've got [00:08:30] the top, you've got the length which is the two dimension of the paper.

[00:08:33] And this is how people think when they're thinking about their website before they deal with a designer. And then the piece that the designer should be giving you is how do people swim through that depth of the website? And that's how I think of it. It's you're right. It's gotta be, We've got to be thinking about the funnels.

[00:08:50] We've got to be thinking about where do we want the top funnel people to go on your site? Where do we want that? The mid funnel people, where do we want that sort of like person, where are we putting that click to buy [00:09:00] a button? And how do we get people to funnel through that? So we don't want the typical way of okay, here's my homepage.

[00:09:07] And it's going to have some, I usually homepages have very little content on them. Especially if you're working with a template, like there is only spaces to put in. Buttons and such and then they don't put any copy on that. And really you want your homepage to be the most helpful in terms of copy and getting people through that funnel.

[00:09:28] And then and then [00:09:30] you want to be funneling people through to other pages. So that's exactly right. So on that homepage, you're going to catch that person up at the top. Who's ready to buy right now with that. Buy now button or book an appointment button or call me button. Then you're gonna give them a little bit more information down the page so that you can get them into that mid funnel where you have enough information for them to direct them where they can do the rest of their research that they need.

[00:09:54] So here are the highlights. Where's the rest of the research on your services? And then further down is the blog, [00:10:00] usually the testimonials, the blog. Oh, the blog and the and the. The top funnel, which is sign up to the newsletter, generally speaking, or a downloadable will be at the near the bottom.

[00:10:10] So thinking about your funnel is super important when you're building a website and I'm off of the home page topic again. Sorry. That's the starting point of the funnel, but I think you made some really good points there, which made me want to lead into what my funnel is. Third item for important things on the [00:10:30] homepage was that hero section.

[00:10:32] That would be that first section after your header logo navigation stuff. And what you had mentioned was like a call us or buy now button. And it made me think, and I didn't make note of this, but it's something that's important is that sometimes people tend to try to do one type of call to action. On a site, I believe for the homepage, you're going to have multiple [00:11:00] one that would maybe in the top of the header, which would be like a button that's like by now or anything that you may, might want.

[00:11:10] People to be able to access as soon as they come to their site. And that would be like a supplemental or secondary call to action to me and your main call to action on the homepage would be whatever you put in your hero section, especially if it's like an e commerce site or like you, if you're trying to get someone to sign up to a service or.

[00:11:29] [00:11:30] Or something like that hero section is there to really have your main call to action of what it is you really want people to do as soon as they get to your homepage, but you can't have other call, like secondary calls to action, like a contact or a by now, or, something in the header, a lot of people have that at the very far it's just always there and then.

[00:11:54] Like you said, there's other secondary call to actions at the bottom, typically for mailing lists, [00:12:00] signups, and things like that. But that hero section, which is my third on the list, is pretty important. One of those things where it's the biggest thing you want to highlight for your site when people land there.

[00:12:11] Yes, absolutely. However, having said that while you do want multiple calls to action in terms of that sort of funnel depth or interest or where the person is at that funnel, you don't want a whole pile of them. I've also gone to some sites where it's learn, they've got the force sections and they've [00:12:30] got, learn more.

[00:12:31] And then they've got another four sections below that. And it's like a lot of repetitiveness. Like we need to work that out a little bit. Or you don't want to have 50 things that you want somebody to do. So you don't want the book an appointment and call us and there's sometimes there's just too much.

[00:12:47] And then you try and. I've seen this before, not so much anymore. Like it's a thing of the aughts time period where people were trying to, they were putting it all on there and then they were trying to create a hierarchy [00:13:00] through through all caps and underlines and different colors and all that sort of stuff, which most people have moved away from now, but we still want to keep that hierarchy of call to action more so in how high up is it.

[00:13:13] Like your most important one here, your next important one for the research here. And then your third one, which is let me nurture you is at the bottom.

[00:13:23] Proceed with anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or it might take me two years to get there, [00:13:30] which is sometimes.

[00:13:32] Yeah. So anything else regarding hero section you'd like to add? Yeah. So a couple of things came up on a client's, a recent client's site that I wanted to point out. You really want to make sure that you're working with a designer for this area, because not only does the type of photograph that you choose, the type of, if you're using B roll video.

[00:13:53] in behind. You need to really make sure that accessibility is going to be well organized so that the button actually shows. [00:14:00] And you want that text and that button to be organized in, in the same rules as graphic design. So you want you want it to sit on a certain point. You want that button to sit on a certain point on the lines.

[00:14:13] If you were going to draw the grid, the what do they call that? The golden mean, the grid, the golden ratio. Yeah. You want that to be organized properly because that's going to feel good. It's actually you get an anxiety when things aren't placed in the right spot, [00:14:30] especially on this one particular header where they had put the the call to action way on their.

[00:14:35] On the left. And then the main part of the photo was way on the right. And there was this dead empty space in the center. And so what happens is your eyes, you want to think about your eyes. My eyes were like, literally going back and forth trying to make the meaning and it was anxiety and Annoying.

[00:14:52] It was totally annoying. But sometimes people respond to things psychologically. They don't necessarily know why they don't like something. [00:15:00] They might not even see that this is the thing that I'm not liking. But they, what does affect the way that they interact on your site? If things are not looking professional, there is a reason why that's an industry.

[00:15:15] Yeah. One of the other things I was going to say about a hero section is that you may not have something that you're trying to sell immediately on your website and that header section can [00:15:30] also just be used to further reinforce who your company is so that people People might recognize, okay, this is where I need to go, but don't know as much about you.

[00:15:44] And you can also use that space to further clarify exactly what your business offers or does to make sure that person is okay, yeah, this is what I'm looking for.

[00:15:58] Statement or a [00:16:00] tagline, something like that is usually found in the text above the call to action. That's usually that's right. I totally forgot that part. No, I was just further to be it being like a typical call to action because typically when I. When I think of Hero Sections, a lot of people are immediately trying to sell something, sell you their biggest site.

[00:16:22] But there are times when then maybe it's a site that doesn't specifically sell something to you right away, but it's, but you [00:16:30] provide. A service that you just need to make sure people understand. Yes, this is what we do. You're at the right place. Is just as important than trying to immediately sell them something or go to a buy page to, to get them to sign up for something.

[00:16:49] Yeah. You want them to self select in. Yeah. Yeah. And further to that, I know you already talked about some visuals, obviously for the Hero [00:17:00] section, but we have that as a separate item to just visual content that's going to make sure to reinforce reinforce what you do and give people that warm, fuzzy feeling that they know exactly what they're going to get from you.

[00:17:16] So visual content typically is a really big impact in that hero section. Yeah. And there's a really, there are a few good rules that I like to follow when I'm thinking about visuals. And some of this has just [00:17:30] recently come up because I've been heat mapping some new sites and and this has become a thing.

[00:17:34] So you want things, you want your visuals to be super clear what they are. So what that means is Make sure that your visual is not going to be mistaken for a button because you get rage clicks on that image and if you use a heat map on your website, it's really the most interesting feedback that you get on your [00:18:00] website, actually, to be honest, and you can figure out what's working for people and what's not.

[00:18:05] Where they click and where they try to click and I've been going in and putting links where people are automatically trying to click like where they want to find a call button where they want to find more information to whatever was being spoken about in that. Paragraph, and that's been super interesting on helping me build out things and change things and respond to the interaction.

[00:18:28] So design is great [00:18:30] and data, the data to reinforce that design is actually really good too. So some of the things that I've noticed is that you want your photos to be. To be recognizable photos and not buttons. So sometimes if they're at a certain size, people will just try and click.

[00:18:46] And a lot of photos on websites now are clickable spots, especially on the blog snippet section, that kind of thing. So you want to. You want to check for that. Then the second thing is there's a big [00:19:00] move towards doing photos that are not descriptive. I think that move happened a long time ago, but a lot of people are taking a long time to figure that out.

[00:19:07] So I don't like it's not about me either. Actually, I just realized I don't like who cares what you like, but I don't feel what works is working anymore. Are things that look like Descriptive stock photography. So stock photography is fine. It's not the best. Obviously branded photos are always best.

[00:19:24] And what I mean by that is you hire your photographer and you do a whole bunch of random stock, like [00:19:30] photography, but but there is also this little movement that I've noticed is happening and it's been spoken about more and more is that we want And it's interesting because it flows with how websites are being developed in different ways in terms of different aspects of the design, like especially the copywriting.

[00:19:47] We want to focus not on what we are doing here. Look at this photo. This is what we're doing here. This is what we're doing for you in the services section. Instead, we want to flip the sentence structure so that we're actually [00:20:00] focusing on what How the service is going to benefit the end user.

[00:20:04] How is that going to change their life? What kind of lifestyles is going to give to you? Or what kind of experience can you expect from this service? And then the photos need to match up in a sense where you want to have photos that maybe show more a point of view for the end user.

[00:20:19] For the for the end user. So it could be, and I used to use this a lot. We want to have photos with people. We want people that look like they're happy because [00:20:30] they've done your, they've used your service and photos that are easily for me to imagine myself and project myself into a relationship with you already.

[00:20:39] We might want diversity. We always want diversity actually in all of that. We want to think about who our target market is. Do we really want the Medispa's kill me this? Like it's all skinny women in their 20 white women in their twenties. Usually they're, that's the worst kind of photography.

[00:20:55] So think about who it is, who your target market is. Match that [00:21:00] up in some way. And then also use the point of view photos that people are using on social On Instagram, but not quite as Instagrammable point of view. So if you look, there are some new stock photography companies that are coming up from millennials that have started it early late millennials in particular, and they're there what they think is hip and new is completely different than what other stock photography companies are utilizing.

[00:21:24] So think about your brand, think about your target market, and then see what's right for you in those photos, [00:21:30] because you can do some really more interesting things. So instead of showing what they're doing, which is different, instead of showing the computer on a table that on a desk, they will show legs crossed at the, in the chair next to the desk with the computer.

[00:21:43] Like they put the person actually physically in the photo so that you can do that sort of bridging of the gap of, yes, you can imagine yourself here. We are helping you. And this is what it looks like. And Sorry. That's me [00:22:00] relaxing in front of it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So those are some things about visuals that I like.

[00:22:06] And and then ask yourself, is this too much information? Could I move this piece of text somewhere else? Could it be a downloadable guide? Could it be, does it have to be like that? Do we want this much text on the homepage? Probably not. And then the other aspect, which is still fairly visuals formatting.

[00:22:25] So make sure that there's lots of, we don't write paragraphs the same way [00:22:30] for online as we do when we're writing an essay. Because We need space in between points that we're making like important points. We want to put that line drop in so that the eyes can rest and really absorb it. And okay.

[00:22:45] I think that's it. Because you are going to possibly tend to have multiple things that you want to get across and you can't be wordy on everything you need. You need that. Just that little bit of text that says. As much [00:23:00] as you need to entice the person to be like, okay, this is what I'm looking for.

[00:23:05] Click to get more of that information. And one last thing that I want to say, what don't do, because we don't, we try and remain positive, but take your sliders off your homepage. Oh my goodness. That is the best thing you can do for your SEO. And it's a really dated look. So no sliders. I'm not a date. And I'm not a huge fan of sliders, but in [00:23:30] certain cases they do provide something that you need.

[00:23:38] I'll just, I'll say it that way. Okay. Okay. If, and if you're going to do a slider, no more than two to three images, like that's gotta be tops because it is really ruining your SEO. The way I'm doing sliders now, if people have. Multiple things that they want in e especially like sliders in the, are you talking about sliders generally [00:24:00] anywhere or sliders in the hero section, because I'm not a fan of people just having 20 images that are slide.

[00:24:08] Yeah. But at the top, the way I'm doing sliders now is a consistent visual behind the slider and some rotating text. Okay, a statement. And then, but the but that slides off and there's another statement of some sort, but [00:24:30] the visual, like the look of everything stays the same. I'm not sure I'd have to check with my SEO expert, but.

[00:24:36] From what I understand, I am attempting to take all sliders off of all my sites, even the small ones that are on the about section or especially the, what, where we usually see them as in testimonials getting rid of them. They just drag down the site because the site the site is measured from, even though you can see the first slider and it loads nicely.

[00:24:58] [00:25:00] And the user experience is fine. It doesn't stop. It doesn't stop measuring the load time on that page until the last slider is loaded. So it really does affect your SEO. So it's true. It does depend on yours, on your site and what your industry is and what you're trying to do as to whether.

[00:25:18] If you want to take that risk on, or, you take, you obviously make decisions. What is important to, as to what is important. But from a strictly SEO perspective, we're removing all [00:25:30] sliders everywhere.

[00:25:32] And interestingly enough, where we used to see a lot of top banner sliders were on e commerce stores because they'd have a few, like they'd have a. A new collection and then the sales items and then all of that. And they would like to put that up and flash that. But now I noticed some of the bigger sites, the and the best sites that are out there, like that are really giant companies.

[00:25:51] They're actually putting multiple best skinny banners, multiple skinny banners down the top. Yeah. Or one at the top and then two more 50, [00:26:00] 50 or that kind of a thing. I see a lot of that too. Yeah, so that's how they're handling the SEO part, I think. And we are coming at time, but I did want to say one other important thing before we sign off was social proof, like testimonials and things like that are one of those things that is important for the site overall.

[00:26:25] But again, on the homepage, because everybody lands there and they're going to be [00:26:30] deciding. Whether they want to do business with you or get your service, having that on there, typically underneath all of those other spots where you're trying to get them to go off to a service or a product, but still on that home page lower down for that, for them to recognize, okay, these people have, they're reputable.

[00:26:49] They've done business with, whoever, if you're showing company logos of people that you are clients or people that have just bought things from you and are giving [00:27:00] testimonials, very important for the homepage to have that on there. Yeah. So how many do you put on the homepage? If they're testimonials, I like three.

[00:27:10] A three pack, shall I call it? That does that typically are usually in a slider. So if they have five or six, maybe I'll display three and people can cycle through the others. Is how I often put them on my site. Yeah. Yeah. So I like [00:27:30] the three, we do three sometimes four depends on the design and then we move them to another testimonials page if they want to read more instead of the slider.

[00:27:40] Yeah. And the last before we sign off again would be your footer. Your footer, obviously every page has a footer, but the content in your footer. Is quite important because you're probably going to have a lot of pages down there that wouldn't be in your main navigation. But [00:28:00] everybody knows that typically the footer has like a lot of page links to other information.

[00:28:07] So putting all of that down there and allowing people to scroll to the bottom and get to those pages. It's very important. Yes. Absolutely. So we quickly went through the end there, but we're going on for 45 minutes to an hour. Totally. And a lot of the, a lot of our next items we did, [00:28:30] I rattled through a lot of them at the top when I wasn't supposed to.

[00:28:33] So sorry about that. Yeah. I think most for the most part, we got everything that we identified out throughout the whole process. Yeah. The whole thing. So with that said, thanks everybody for joining us today. If you have any questions, drop them in the in the comments and for anybody not watching in the group, we post this live from cyberpunk geeks, marketing [00:29:00] mixer Facebook groups.

[00:29:01] So go over there if you're not in there and join us and next week. I think we have next week. We have Phelan and Pip on why use Tag Manager for your marketing, which is really important session if you're interested in getting into ads. Perfect. Thanks everyone for joining. See you next week.

00:00 - Introduction to Instagram and Facebook Strategies for 2024
00:34 - Exploring Instagram Hashtag Strategies
02:45 - The Power of Ads on Facebook and Instagram
08:36 - AI and Messenger Strategies for Engagement
13:38 - Authentic Content vs. AI in Social Media Marketing
25:10 - E-commerce and Social Media Integration

[00:00:00] Rina: I'm Pip Seymour, digital media. This is Rina from Littleworks Indymedia. And what are we talking about today, Rina? We are talking about Instagram and Facebook strategies in 2024. What's working and what's not working. I just added that second piece in because we're already in May. Okay. Let's get onto our topic though, because we only have minutes and I know you love this. This is my wheelhouse. Just a couple of things I wanted to talk [00:00:30] about and some questions I'd like to pose because I want to know what other people are trying out there.

[00:00:34] Exploring Instagram Hashtag Strategies

[00:00:34] Rina: But one of the things that came up for me recently in two different sources was the hashtags on Instagram. So there's a thought that's moved. That's circulating on social media that adding hashtags. Instagram posts might not be the best idea. So while it could get you some new followers, maybe some new people that are reading your [00:01:00] posts, what they say is that it takes like half, it takes half of your algorithm percentage away.

[00:01:08] Rina: So it splits off what would normally go to your follower list if you don't use hashtags. So, some people are saying that it's probably Possibly better to use, not to not use hashtags if you want more engagement on your Instagram posts, I suppose on the other side of it, though, if you're looking to get new users and grow your [00:01:30] Instagram, then perhaps using the hashtags is a really good idea.

[00:01:33] Rina: So has anyone tried that out there? If you have, I'd love to know if you've done any testing and how that's worked out for you. This is specific to Instagram. By the way, just to make sure that everyone's clear on that. So I'd love to hear because I haven't tested it yet, but I'm planning on rolling that out in the next few weeks just to see what kind of results that gives us.

[00:01:55] Rina: So are you going to test on so an account that has a [00:02:00] large following versus an account that has a small following for that? What are you thinking? I'll probably working on midsize because that's really what I, what my client. My clients are, but first I'll try it on my own account to see how that works and then I'll see how that does.

[00:02:17] Rina: I suspect that's going to be a big difference as to whether or not how many followers you have will, play into if that's an effective strategy or not. And so every [00:02:30] year, like Facebook and Instagram are a bit like the Google algorithm updates, there's updates and we have to identify the strategies to work around them to get to our audience, right?

[00:02:41] Rina: Because they're gatekeeping now with ads.

[00:02:45] The Power of Ads on Facebook and Instagram

[00:02:45] Rina: I know you recommend ads all the time. Yeah, so that is the, that should have been the first point. I guess I didn't really organize my points in a particularly cohesive manner, but yes, absolutely. So we're going through strategies right now that are just specifically for [00:03:00] organic tactics because ads are always the best.

[00:03:03] Rina: The better answer for so many reasons, depending it does depend on what you're, trying to do. But especially if you're a small business and you don't have a huge following ads can be really useful in that, in that mix. Yeah. And so when you do ads, you do them on Facebook and then they go on Instagram.

[00:03:23] Rina: Is that correct? Or could you just have an Instagram account? You can do both. So you can [00:03:30] run ads from an Instagram account. I recommend running your Instagram ads from your meta account. Business manager or creative that sort of thing. Everybody loves one loves to hate. You mean yeah, and, you can do, I also recommend you can just do one ad and send it out to both.

[00:03:53] Rina: You can also split and have two ads under the same campaign utilizing the [00:04:00] same ad budget. And you can have multiple ads for each, stream, which is ideal. Okay. And then test those on each stream. That's interesting that each stream, a little bit more work, but better results.

[00:04:17] Rina: I find, that's true. Yeah. Because if you're in charge of your placements, rather than allowing Facebook to organize your placements for you, it can, it really, and it also, it depends on what your, [00:04:30] goal is. You really need to be goal focused. There's not one answer that's going to be perfect for every single business out there.

[00:04:37] Rina: Ah, yes. Okay. Those generic fill you into a box don't work. Every strategy has to be slightly different depending on the client, the audience, the area, right? Because if your goal is to get traffic to your website, Based on really specific targeting on your ads, then you're gonna [00:05:00] want, you're going to want Facebook to help you figure out where to where those people are.

[00:05:05] Rina: And if it is on cross platform, because Facebook buys ads space on Google ads, it buys ad space in different places that it's called cross platform, I believe, ends up being There's a lot of that inside Google ads, those people that sell programmatic advertising. It's, actually done inside Google ads and one of the components is that you could show [00:05:30] up on Facebook depending on the targeting, right?

[00:05:33] Rina: Which is really interesting. Yeah, so they both send traffic into places that you're not thinking about and you might not know. There are some other cases where I have turned that placements off because I specifically didn't want my ads going into in articles or on apps because, it wasn't the right spot in my mind.

[00:05:56] Rina: Sometimes I find those places will be cheaper. [00:06:00] So sometimes agencies utilize them to reduce your ad spend results like, the, to make it look better because the clicks are. cheaper. So it really, again, it's a, it depends as the answer is always the answer. Yes. Oh, that is always the answer.

[00:06:19] Rina: That is always the great answer. Okay. So you're telling us. Not to, so if we're not a big, or if We might not grow as well as we like if [00:06:30] we use hashtags now. Is that the new way? That's not what I said. Sorry. It's the opposite. Okay, if you're looking for more engagement then try removing the hashtags. Okay, but if you're looking for more reach, if you're looking to grow Your audience, then perhaps hashtags might work.

[00:06:49] Rina: Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Actually. Yeah. So this is going to be some testing that we're going to roll out. I'm very excited about that because I always love testing the theories, but I [00:07:00] couldn't help but note it. I felt like a weird theory to be circulating, but I saw it a number of times. So I'm going to try it out.

[00:07:07] Rina: Did you hear the weird one? So it makes sense. It does make sense because it sounds like you're just, if you want to just talk to your already existing audience. Don't try to spread yourself out. So that makes sense. It's What was it? Apple? They just came out with how you're supposed to close your tabs, basically, [00:07:30] that takes up more battery.

[00:07:32] Rina: So you're supposed to just leave everything running now. And that's the opposite of what they originally trained us to do. You're saying that leaving all your tabs open is ideal for battery? That's what they're saying, yeah, to save battery life. I feel like I'm winning all of a sudden. That's funny. So yeah, I guess You know, I think paying attention more now to social [00:08:00] strategies and a combination of strategies, like actually using search and social together is making more and more sense as we develop into this beast of an online space, right?

[00:08:11] Rina: Like you can't just be one place really anymore, or you have to be attentive to these different platforms, depending on your business and what you're doing what is it focus on one, get good at it. Move to the next, right? I think that's, yeah, and then [00:08:30] have a few more other things on our thing.

[00:08:34] Rina: We do.

[00:08:36] AI and Messenger Strategies for Engagement

[00:08:36] Rina: So I think one of the big ones is the AI stuff we should talk about. Cause I don't know what's going on in there for AI, for social content and things like that. But one of the things that is It's becoming more and more evident on, meta is to be using AI powered messenger experiences.

[00:08:55] Rina: Now it takes a little bit of time and organization and you don't want to choose the [00:09:00] default settings on this because, Oh my God, the default settings are hilarious. One of my team members put on a default. for messaging, on one of my ads and I could not figure out for the life of me why I was getting all these weird messages from people on the ad morning.

[00:09:19] Rina: And it turns out that physically anyone who leaves a comment gets an automated message. How can we help you? Which you can see how annoying that is [00:09:30] because they're like, what do you mean? How can you help me? I didn't ask for help. It doesn't make any sense. You have to make it make sense. important to do that.

[00:09:40] Rina: And, so that's one thing. So, this is, where is this on Facebook or Instagram? It's messenger. Okay. So it's, so from what I, see, it comes on Facebook. So it's only the engagement that happens on Facebook. I haven't seen any evidence [00:10:00] of this particular system happening from Instagram.

[00:10:04] Rina: Although, I haven't looked like this is one case study that we're doing. That kind of messaging. AI messaging could be useful. I have set up messenger sequences that are super fun because they help you. They help people self identify out of a funnel, which can be useful. So you can set up sort of two spaces.

[00:10:29] Rina: So the [00:10:30] people who are good, ideal clients can go in one direction and get that phone call. And then people who are still on the fence or still don't understand they're high up in the funnel. They can go into a different, end result and get onto your newsletter list or book of webinar or whatever.

[00:10:49] Rina: So that can be quite useful, but the AI one, I'm not entirely sure how complex it could be because the AI. I'm not sure if the AI helps you do the [00:11:00] setup for these automated messages or if the AI actually speaks for you like some of the other, yeah. That piece I'm looking forward to exploring again.

[00:11:10] Rina: We are exploring Messenger stuff in LinkedIn. I like talking to people in Messenger in Facebook, but that's, is that through? So they're talking to not the person, but the business in Messenger, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's really funny because you want to position yourself as a business [00:11:30] with a team generally out there, but you also want to realize that people want to do business with people.

[00:11:37] Rina: It's true. It is absolutely true. So you can actually set up the messenger on Facebook to to be auto sent to a member on your team. So that's one thing that you can do. I'm not, I still think that they get the page. Messenger, but it can allow people to go in and [00:12:00] introduce themselves so that would be useful.

[00:12:02] Rina: But yeah, it works completely different than LinkedIn, which is really not that great for brands, much, much better for people. So that's true. I would agree. That's interesting. So I think we've seen a lot of people this year go over to Instagram. We've seen a lot of people that are now coming back into Facebook, into Instagram.

[00:12:24] Rina: People are maybe making some decisions leaving TikTok or making a alternative [00:12:30] plan because of the news. So it's going to be really interesting to see what, The different platforms do, especially with the AI and all the things happening in that space, right? I think we're seeing I think Phelan had Gemini in bedded in his phone search results.

[00:12:50] Rina: And we got I wonder, are you seeing anything with AI stuff inside? Like Facebook, are they generating posts for people yet? What do you think they will? Oh, [00:13:00] they will help you organize your creative. And they have the whole messenger thing set up. Those are the only two aspects that I've seen.

[00:13:09] Rina: I haven't seen anything with posting in content planner, but I also haven't looked today, but I will go to look. You gotta look every day. I didn't think of that. Every day, right? Isn't that interesting? Cause every day new things are coming up. This industry is on fire, but in a really positive way, which I think, [00:13:30] we're not all realizing, which is great, which is there's great.

[00:13:33] Rina: It's great. There's AI, but we need people to wield it. Like it is.

[00:13:38] Authentic Content vs. AI in Social Media Marketing

[00:13:38] Rina: Thing about AI that contradicts the next issue that we have on our checklist is authentic content. So how do you actually implement and utilize AI in a way that is going to come across authentically? And that is That's always the issue.

[00:13:56] Rina: So you need to actually make sure that your brand voice is there, that you're, [00:14:00] that nothing, not everything says discover or unleash. Oh, what's the one? Deep dive and delve are my two. Oh, delve I like deep, dive because I, have the fish as our logo. But if it's going to be, if you're going to use, I guess the thing about authenticity And from me and people get this wrong all the time, in my mind, it's I know we're not supposed to say it.

[00:14:27] Rina: Be judgy. But the fact is, that [00:14:30] people sometimes get mixed up about what being authentic is. It doesn't mean sharing every little aspect of yourself online, because I would never get behind that, but sounding like your, brand voice, your personality, like having a well developed personality and brand voice is super important.

[00:14:47] Rina: And so when, and being accurate, and this is what, And that's what really irks me when I read other people's marketing, who are using AI is they'll say things like, and this, came up for me with a client because she actually [00:15:00] moved to our agency away from another agency based on this one thing alone, or one of these, this is one of our top pet peeves is that they kept saying it's a deep dive when it was really a half an hour podcast, right?

[00:15:15] Rina: Which is never a deep dive. You cannot deep. If it's going to surface. Okay. Yeah. If you're going to say deep dive, it actually needs to be a freaking deep dive, right? Yeah, you could say, dive, dive, just take, a dive in, dive into this topic [00:15:30] for half an hour. Great. And that's real. That is real.

[00:15:34] Rina: That is believable. That is. It's grounded in reality. And that's the thing that I find is the most frustrating thing with AI is it makes everything sound fan freaking tastic and way, and blows, blows it up way more than it actually is. Something is, what was the word that came out yesterday that I had to redo?

[00:15:54] Rina: It was wasn't extraordinary. It was something, but it was something like fan freaking [00:16:00] tastic. And it, I looked at the content, I'm like, is this though? Is this that? Is this exciting? Is this really do we really love this? Or is this actually just really useful and and a great start to learn about a topic, yeah and that's the thing. I think things now will take more research to sift through the plethora of content. Good content is still. [00:16:30] Good content, which can't just be spit out. Like you actually have to have knowledge. Also personalized content. And this is where they're trying to like Google in particular, trying to get rid of the the the content farming practices that have been done.

[00:16:46] Rina: So the idea that you can pull stuff off of the internet and re, Restate the exact same things that have been said millions of times already is not helpful. So what they're looking for [00:17:00] that's going to be helpful is to personalize it for your company, personalize it for your clients or like the case studies, introducing case studies.

[00:17:08] Rina: So you might have the top five things to do on Instagram as opposed that everybody's done, but you might put like your examples might be actually client examples rather than just Statements of do this, and this, these are the results we got when we did it with this client so that you're [00:17:30] actually creating personalized content, like custom content for yourself.

[00:17:35] Rina: And that's going to be super important when it comes to creating this authentic brand feel that is less about. Farming information, which is what they're trying to get away from. Super important. And that farming information thing, which is really interesting in SEO. If there's two pieces of content that are identical, Google has to wait, which one [00:18:00] is better.

[00:18:00] Rina: And so if you would say have two websites and you have the same content on both, you can actually tell Google to prefer one over the other. Yeah. So you can still have, or as a, for your own content. For your own content, for your own content I don't like, I don't know how you would devalue someone else's if they've copied you.

[00:18:21] Rina: They just go down over time because they're the spam. But, for somebody who's maybe separating their businesses or they have, [00:18:30] a piece of content on one business that will suit the other one somehow versus upping it and removing it, yeah. So I, there's a lot going on in, in the digital.

[00:18:42] Rina: space, I believe for especially for socials. I know I talk about SEO and stuff a lot, but I'm so interested in the, cross platform integration, the AI stuff that's happening, the, I'd like to up my game on Instagram. [00:19:00] And so I'm going to be following you, Rina.I'm very excited about that.

[00:19:04] Rina: Cause we're going to be doing some really fun stuff on our Instagram page soon. Okay, so what I wanted to talk about is again, hi the, idea of this authentic content also includes high quality and what we're moving around, and we've seen this on almost every platform, we're moving away from highly branded content.

[00:19:25] Rina: So you might not want to put your logo on every single thing that you put up. That's or you might [00:19:30] not want a template exactly for everything. The same every time. Okay. Yeah. Those especially cards on videos. So you, the thing that we know gets the best engagement is especially for video is when it's a picture of a screen cap of a stop.

[00:19:50] Rina: Yeah. Yeah, that one. So those kinds of images, I hope nobody's screencapped in that one. But those [00:20:00] images actually got way more clicks. So if you're targeting the right people, then that's going to give you a more higher click. And it also seems more believable and less less slick. Do we put, are we putting, I know YouTube took off their story or their short thing cover.

[00:20:22] Rina: Do we still have Instagram covers and for reels and things? Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do. We don't, I [00:20:30] don't use them anymore. Sometimes I'll use them. Okay, so that's the line. So we'll use them so that you can't actually see them. So what we do is we take the very first frame that's going to happen. We create a still, and then we might put the hook Like the hook, the video on that particular screen.

[00:20:48] Rina: So it looks like we've put a sentence on the video itself, but we actually haven't. That's how we technically, how we do it. Yeah. So there's a big strategy [00:21:00] that goes on in there now. Oh, totally. Yeah. Totally. I a lot of that strategy I'm picking up from TikTok, but it seems to work really well on Instagram also.

[00:21:10] Rina: Yeah. That's the, so where do people go from TikTok? They're going to go to Instagram. Would you recommend them separating their Instagram and Facebook feeds? Again, it depends. You're going to ask me all the questions and I'm just going to always say it depends. It depends on what your goals are for Facebook.

[00:21:28] Rina: We do, for most [00:21:30] of our clients I will post them. Facebook and put it out as a real on sorry post a real on Instagram and put it as a real on Facebook. Ideally, if you have all the time in the world and you're creating a ton of content, then it's better to separate. But at the same time, I don't think it brings, it depends on where you are in your business.

[00:21:53] Rina: If you're just starting out, then don't do that. Like just do the same thing, put it out make, little changes on how you're [00:22:00] presenting the information and feed the algorithm. And, especially if you have no ad budget and you want to make sure what we're trying to do with that, with the organic.

[00:22:13] Rina: With the organic strategies, which is what we're really focusing on here is we want to get the best algorithmic push. For our money. So let the numbers tell you when the next post should come out. Don't, go on a sequence [00:22:30] of a one post every day. That might work better on Instagram. It's not going to work that great on Facebook.

[00:22:35] Rina: I know that much. They also talk about video versus photos. So video is definitely a king, but photos are still working quite well on Instagram. So we shouldn't abandon them completely. Not everybody's flipping through reels on Instagram. Some older people like me is scrolling through the feed, right?

[00:22:56] Rina: So you want to make sure there's something there for them. And same [00:23:00] with Facebook, cause you got to go to a different spot to look at reels on Facebook. And, So yes, it depends. And what we don't want to do and what I never recommend is creating a whole pile of content and just continually posting.

[00:23:14] Rina: It's just not the best idea. So what happens on most of these algorithmic platforms is that you will get continue to get reach every time you post something, and then you get some engagement, you get a little more, and then you get another piece of engagement, you get a little more, you get another. And [00:23:30] that's why engagement so important and why we're always looking for it.

[00:23:33] Rina: But as soon as you make another post, the algorithmic push on that previous post flattens. Interesting. Yeah. So best to, yeah, okay. That makes sense. So you want to have the, your content do the best job it can before you're posting new content. Yeah. And if you look at your insights, You can actually see what is the best cycle for my [00:24:00] content on Facebook.

[00:24:01] Rina: You can do that. And you can decide that it might be every three days on Facebook, or you might want to make sure that your best post, your more important post comes after the post that has gets you, that you know is going to get you the most engagement, because you're also rewarded with your algorithm.

[00:24:19] Rina: So whatever, if you did a really good job on one post, and that's why you see a lot of these weird polls and memes and things that go out right before right before [00:24:30] a sales post. So you kick up that algorithm, and then you make your sales post. And then that sales post will do better than say you do it the opposite way where you do the sales post first that week and then the, meme or whatever fun post you've got going on second.

[00:24:47] Rina: So you, that, that's something to consider too. And we're just, we only have three more minutes. Can we just take, make sure that we, yeah. The cross platform integration. Generate quality [00:25:00] leads. There's one really big topic that we haven't talked about that I think we can just at least cover enough to get, to get going.

[00:25:09] Rina: And that's the integration.

[00:25:10] E-commerce and Social Media Integration

[00:25:10] Rina: It seems that all platforms are integrating shopping even more seamlessly. They're trying to remove all the friction points so that you can actually just go straight from post to shop. And and if you're not, if you've got an e commerce site. Set up somewhere, or if you have products that you can sell online fairly [00:25:30] easily, then you want to be utilizing that ask that aspect and looking into that area of social media across the board, not just Facebook and Instagram.

[00:25:39] Rina: And to make sure that you're set up for success, I buy things and I buy things how I buy, I am a discerning shopper and Okay, so in a rush, yeah, I might head over to [00:26:00] Amazon. I know that YouTube has been integrating video with shopping. I know that TikTok does it.

[00:26:06] Rina: I haven't bought anything off TikTok. I don't know if you have. I've almost, but then and then I'm like, ugh. This is a lot of work. I actually don't know because I know I bought something from either TikTok or Instagram and it was a very big something like that was a very big. What is the something?

[00:26:24] Rina: You got to share the something. Oh yeah. No, I think I've mentioned it before. Oh. [00:26:30] Yes, you bought a program. Yeah. So I bought the top funnel program and then I bought the large program that they were sold me afterwards. So that's I don't know, that was a lot of money that I, paid. And you're not the only one.

[00:26:44] Rina: I know. I'm not, embarrassed about it. It was the perfect targeting for me. It was exactly what I was looking for at that time. And they did an excellent job of targeting me. And it probably helped you. Yeah. And it took me about eight [00:27:00] times of seeing that ad before I booked the sales call. That'd be right.

[00:27:05] Rina: So seven, eight touches. Yeah. You can't, when you look at the, yes, exactly. Although I think I got the same ad over and over again, that many times, which surprised me. Oh, so that, you know what strategy that is. No, that's repeat, repeat, When you're addressing your ads, when you're looking at your ad results, you want to be looking at [00:27:30] I forgot what the metric is called.

[00:27:32] Rina: It's called it's not repeats. Now I got that in my head. What is it called? It's called, I don't know, but it's a word. Is it's usually people turn it off even if it's at 1. 5, but I usually wait until at least. It's not retargeting, it's it's the number of times that your ad is served to the same person.

[00:27:55] Rina: Yeah. Yeah. You can I know in Google ads, you set that up to be only four, [00:28:00] if you're going to do that. Four max. In, I don't think they have that option in Facebook. You just get there. Yeah. You have to check in on that. That is not when you're not changing the content out. After 1. 3 times.

[00:28:17] Rina: And we are out of time. Ah, it's good to be back. If you're joining us, pipe in and say hi. I see Phalen shot us another message about chatbot and messages. Oh, wow. It's crazy out there. And Rina?

[00:28:29] Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead

[00:28:29] Rina: Before [00:28:30] we go, do you know what we're talking about next week? Yes, I haven't hit this. I am I'm so on it today.

[00:28:36] Rina: It's so weird. So we are talking about the key elements, every website homepage needs, and I believe that will be me and Greg. That's awesome. I guess Phelan's getting a little break after the seven weeks. I think I might buy him a cake for managing the slash video podcast that we do. If you're joining us for the first time on another channel, we [00:29:00] post Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, I think now, Rina our Geek Speak, which we do weekly, right?

[00:29:07] Rina: So just tune in wherever you are and we'll see y'all next week. Sounds good. Yeah. Bye. Bye.

00:00 - Introduction & Overview of This Episode
00:25 - Major SEO Updates and Algorithm Changes
03:31 - AI Integration in Marketing and Its Challenges
09:38 - Social Media Trends: AI Rules and TikTok Developments
17:38 - Key Tech and Platform Updates: Google, WordPress, and More
26:22 - Conclusion and Preview of Next Week’s Topic

[00:00:00] Hello there. It's that time once again, it is Thursday. It's time for GeekSpeak. It's the end of the month. That means we are doing this world in the month of the world of marketing. My name is Phelan with Seymour digital media and I'm Craig with Original72 Creative. Awesome. And so we have more than, when I saw it all laid out, I was like, Oh, that's actually quite a bit of news that's happened this month. And pretty much every facet.

[00:00:25] So I guess. I'd start off with the quicker ones, I guess would be the best way to describe [00:00:30] it. It's just yeah, the SEO stuff. There's obviously a big algorithm update that's just just finished, which was the March one. It was a big update. There was a lot of testing. People thought that their canonical tags weren't working, which is interesting.

[00:00:44] But apparently that was just people were misreading their own internal reports or something. It's a weird one that people were reporting on, but it looks like that it's again, one that was, they're focusing on AI and finding, in this core update, they also said that they're not going to be able to do full detection [00:01:00] of AI as it's it's too ubiquitous.

[00:01:01] Now it's too, and it's too intermixed that basically they're just, if you're doing a hundred percent. They can't figure it out at all, then yeah, or they can figure it out like just easily a quick look, then I think they said that they would ban it. But partial usage is just, it's past the point of detection.

[00:01:16] So they can't do anything about it. So you're saying they can. They can somewhat detect if it's all AI, but if you used AI, like for like bits [00:01:30] and pieces, they can't tell. Basically, if you just went up to ChatGPT and said, make me a website with all the copy and all the images and it just spat it out, that wouldn't rank.

[00:01:39] But if it's got like the A reasonable percentage where there's gray area. They said that they're not going to be as punitive as they, they used to be because it's just, it's too hard. And there's too many websites now. I thought this recent algorithm update was very much on the direction of making sure they do [00:02:00] detect and derank AI.

[00:02:03] Related sites that are, that they know are doing that. So are they, have they said they're going to shift and not really worry about it as much or. My understanding is that they're still want. They're less stressed about whether you used AI and more concerned with the still the quality of the, if it's saying just like insane things and there's no citations, there's no outlet if it looks, if you come to the website, [00:02:30] it looks Like a regular website and it reads like a regular website and you did use some AI to write some of the content They're not going to fault you for that it's basically, they can't the genie's out of the bottle and so right now I think they're more just adapting to the new world like that.

[00:02:44] Yeah. Yeah, and rightly so like it's a tool to help us, do our daily tasks and writing is a big thing. If you could get a jumpstart on, writing something and then edit it to your [00:03:00] own words or revise it or whatever. They shouldn't mark that as content that is irrelevant and not rank your site because you are producing.

[00:03:13] Something that is relevant, obviously for your business, but you had help in getting that information started, right? Yeah. As long as you're using the tool correctly and you're not just trying to like spam affiliate links, then I think that I think that's a reasonable [00:03:30] standpoint to do it.

[00:03:31] Yeah. And then, I guess the other one that I noticed out in the wild was that search console has new filters. So these are useful for any e commerce people. So they have new filters for how you're like, your shopping listings are showing up and you can analyze those ones as well, because it used to be like you could do it from the query or the page, but now it's also going to be your products and your listings to see them over time.

[00:03:54] So I think that's super helpful for e commerce people to just get more insight in how Google is [00:04:00] seeing them, their e commerce SEO. And it looks like you have also for SEO something about cell phones, hosted videos showing up in results now. Yeah. Yeah. So it's they put out a new, so there's an an update to the video schema and part of the core update that we're also testing ranking when you type in how to make banana bread and it has like a bunch of YouTube videos now you could get in that carousel and, but there's like specifics one of the ones I know is it's got to be like [00:04:30] its own self hosted page, YouTube if you put a YouTube link on that page.

[00:04:36] Yeah. I don't know necessarily the value, it's just interesting that they're starting to test this. Personally, I would still be using YouTube because even if you're trying to rank your own channel, it's going to be cheaper than you hosting video because that's going to be expensive and difficult to do.

[00:04:52] And then also we've got switching between the SEO and the social media is going to be that Meta has a new [00:05:00] AI bot that they're in and it's integrating with Bing and Google search results, which is interesting because Google, or famously, infamously the Facebook and Google bot.

[00:05:10] Didn't really get along inside each other's competition. So it's interesting that they would be I wonder how they had enabled that part as well. If Google's like affirmatively allowing it, or if it's like they're just tapping into an API. And so is this the same as what they're calling Lama three?

[00:05:29] [00:05:30] Yeah, speaking and then going off on that. I don't mean to shift. I'm just, I'm not fully up to Meta's integrations with Google and Bing, but I know they also had. Lam Lama three, and I don't, didn't know if it was all the same thing or if they're separate. Separate items. Yeah. So my understanding, like Lama is the algorithm and then the interface that we're talking about is like a AI assistant.

[00:05:59] You know how you [00:06:00] talk to your chat GPT? Yeah. So what they're doing the LAMA is like a big breakthrough on the algorithm side of how to process data and, give information back and then. But yeah the chatbot that we're talking about is uses Lama to get information. So it's more just like how their interface uses data and where it derives that information from, I think is the big one that they're wanting to mention.

[00:06:22] Also with with Facebook cause I remember we were talking about this, that you're you're saying that you're noticing more and more AI [00:06:30] content visible on the platform. And yeah, and it's because that meta has relaxed AI rules around AI content generated similar to Google, the kind of the, the horses left the barn kind of situation that it's, they're not going to be able to. Undo it. They can't just put a ban. And so now they're trying to find that compromise in the middle ground where they're going to allow some of it, but not, I would suppose if you're integrating AI into your own platform, you can't limit.

[00:06:57] The use of AI to go on to your [00:07:00] platform. Yeah, those two things, it would be weird and contradictory. The like them to be like, have a little tool that's AI powered and then not allowing it on the platform. Yeah. And so I think that, that one's going to be interesting to see where that kind of goes.

[00:07:14] Know that like the image generation you were noting was, has gotten better of recent note. It still does some weird things where, you know you ask for it to take out the chopsticks and it adds more chopsticks to the image. But there's still, it is getting better with doing some drawings.

[00:07:29] It's [00:07:30] still yeah, almost spell. I really wish I had more time to play around with all of this stuff. I just. I just don't have the time to, test it all and play with it and have some fun between, all of the work that I have to do, but yeah, it all sounds fun. I should actually look a little bit closer at.

[00:07:52] At Facebook and what they've got going on for the AI now, just to see what they're doing. [00:08:00] Yeah. I for my own sake, I find it. The only part that's annoying is like all of these companies having their own, like competing, like chatbot widgets that like, I'd have to go try them and see if I like it and I have to like, get it's a lot of, for me, it's a lot of lead up time because I'm just like I'm just going to use chat.

[00:08:15] You can see, cause I've already done most of my work with it. So like, why would I go to a new one? That's I'm going to have to like. Train it and how I want responses and figure out how it gives me responses. So I find it a little bit annoying that everyone's, it's like everyone having their own streaming platform, like I'm not.[00:08:30]

[00:08:30] I'm not going to do that. I just want one. I know it's, that would also be bad is to just have one. Yeah. The comparison that's coming to my mind right now is the, that these are the AI wars, like we had for browser wars when, the web first started becoming super popular. And.

[00:08:52] Building websites for me in the early 2000s, you needed to build put in [00:09:00] code differently for each of the browsers so that websites displayed properly and because all of these browsers were fighting for, to add functionality and nobody did it consistently with the, HTML, CSS standards following any of those, web standards, early days, and I feel like AI is similarly going through a war between everybody who's trying to do AI related [00:09:30] stuff and put out these tools and, which one do you use what talks to what it just reminds me of those early days of browser wars.

[00:09:38] Oh yeah. No the five or let the lamp stack wars when there was like Drupal, WordPress, and then who's going to come out on top. Same for what's that? The jQuery cause jQuery had like a bunch of competition when it first came out and then they just ended up winning because it, yeah, it like splits out, everyone kind of finds one and then that one just takes over and it has market dominance that are just, why can't we just [00:10:00] all get along at the beginning?

[00:10:02] Yeah, and of course the person selling shovels in this gold rush is of course, NVIDIA, who's making like an absolute killing selling all of these GPUs to everyone to process all this stuff they've And NVIDIA has been doing well for a couple of years now. Yeah, they they're doing okay.

[00:10:19] Chip manufacturing is definitely the way to go if you can do it. It's and yeah, it's it'll be interesting to see how it does end up. Yeah. If there's consolidation, because they all have big backings [00:10:30] that. Chat GPT is backed by Microsoft and so then you still have Google meta having their own Amazon has their own, but it's like internal cause there's, it's all about like robots, right?

[00:10:42] Like they want to do a lot of though, funny enough, did you, I didn't put this in the notes, but did you hear what happened with the Amazon go store? That store that you could go in and just take something and there's no till. Oh, no, I didn't hear anything about. They quietly shelved the entire project because it turns out while they may not have been hiring [00:11:00] people in the States to work the stores, they had thousands of people in India serve going through the video footage and attributing there was no AI.

[00:11:09] It was just a guy, it's basically a mechanical Turk, like it was, it looked like a bunch of fancy parts, but it was just a bunch of people. Somewhere else doing all the work. And so once they had to admit that part of the project collapsed on itself. And so they so yeah, the great replacement of us by AI bots.

[00:11:27] I don't think we have to worry about just the second. [00:11:30] Moving on from Meta's AI stuff and their, the popularity or rise of their large language model that I heard OpenAI did release some new features in the past week I believe to corporate customers. I wish I, Took a look at the actual article, but I did see something about how, because [00:12:00] Facebook or met us stuff was gaining popularity.

[00:12:04] They did they did release some new things within opening eyes offerings. Ah, okay. All right. I hadn't seen anything when I'd logged in, but yeah, I wouldn't be surprised in the last bit that they, if they had done something like that. Just looking to see do we have any other AI stuff.

[00:12:24] I don't I think we do, but I know the AI stuff. Yeah, it's the Oh, [00:12:30] Jim and I also got released on the workspace as well. Like I think outside of the U S cause now I can use it on my own workspace. It's rather expensive. So I'm like, because they charge you per user and I was like, no, I'm not paying that much for if it's going to be, Oh, really?

[00:12:47] Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's a per user model. Yeah. And it's, it was like 30 bucks per head, which, I have six. Per month? In my, yeah, per month. [00:13:00] So I was like, that's a lot of money to go out the door for that. So yeah, I was not very I was not jumping, chomping at the bit. Cause I kept saying Oh, get a free trial.

[00:13:12] And every time I tried to do the trial, they're just like, Hey, put in your credit card details. And I was like, that's not how a trial works. You need to like, let me know that it's going to be a trial period. And so yeah, it was yeah not my favorite there. But. On the note of Google products, we also have the, that the YouTube's now opening up [00:13:30] like an affiliate hub.

[00:13:30] So I guess it's like a marketplace for people that want to. It's you want to promote a product and get paid affiliate. It's just a good way for just do a marketplace for people that, people who want to do affiliates and people who have affiliate links. I think it's a good matchup and it makes a lot of sense for YouTube, honestly.

[00:13:47] Yeah. I can see a lot of people using affiliate hub to try to promote and get exposure on other [00:14:00] people's popularity and. Just refreshing content or trying to sell things on, yeah on other people's videos. I would say, I think it's a good one as well for like small channels that are just getting started and wouldn't necessarily be able to do like an affiliate link, like right off the get go, but it's a good way to pair the two, two together that if you do need some, it's a good way to make some extra money, especially if you're message of your channel lines up with the product that you're selling.

[00:14:26] You're doing the affiliate link for then I think that's a good combination [00:14:30] there.

[00:14:30] So I guess also we've gotta talk about the bit of the elephant in the room for social media, which is the that the US is sign. The TikTok ban was signed into law yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. So it's it's already going to be challenged in the courts Like it's I don't think it and they've also The sale doesn't have they changed it from 90 days to 360 days.

[00:14:56] So Yeah, so it's going to be a year from [00:15:00] now, which is going to be after the elections and all that stuff. So It won't be like, I think they're just trying to kick the can down the road to make it not a life issue. And so I think that it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out. Uh, it's hard to say one way or the other because there's isn't really a, like a background you can map this to.

[00:15:17] Like it's a bit unprecedented to have a company like this to go through a situation like this. So I'm interested to see how it's going to shake out in the end. Yeah they've said they're going to fight it. And the CEO [00:15:30] himself posted a TikTok or maybe he posted a TikTok saying they were going to fight it and.

[00:15:36] I had read somewhere else something about if they were forced to they were going to sell it, but without the algorithm, which they feel is what makes TikTok, besides the so yeah, it'll be interesting over the next year to see see how that goes personally. I've been thinking about it in we [00:16:00] have so much social media out there.

[00:16:01] I know tick tock because of its algorithm is a fun place to, to be and see stuff, but I'm not going to miss tick tock if it goes away. I'll just put it that way because Instagram there's. Facebook, there's YouTube, it's there's no shortage of places to for creators to put their videos and for people to follow them Yeah, [00:16:30] I'd agree that it's not Oh, sorry to me to cut you off there.

[00:16:34] No, I just so to wrap up my thought is just so You know That's the reason why if for some reason tick tock was sold or went away like I really don't think I'm gonna miss it although that's gonna There are tons of people who do make a good living with the followers that they've gained on that platform.

[00:16:56] So it's gonna hurt a lot of people [00:17:00] who, you know, who have that on the platform. But for me personally I don't use it for anything other than just scrolling when I'm not working. And I'll just do that on Instagram. I think it'll be interesting because I just saw a poll this morning of 18 to 24 year olds majority of their news comes from TikTok, so it's interesting to see how that will shake out with them.

[00:17:25] I don't have any yeah, like you said, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but [00:17:30] I'm happy for them to go to the courts and fight it out as Duke it out with them because I think this is a bit unprecedented to have a company get banned

[00:17:38] Yeah, just thinking of the mechanics how you would actually do that it's I'm just like would you like IP block them or like how would you like? yeah, so just

[00:17:49] Still on TikTok they also did release a feature. I don't know if it's worldwide release or just to some people, but [00:18:00] you can do text based posts now which is cool. Interesting. Yeah I'd say they're trying to take over that Twitter market. Yeah, I don't know if Twitter maybe some Twitter I was thinking of it more, from a an Instagram and oh, yeah.

[00:18:18] Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, let's see thing but yeah, I don't know. I just know that this was something that was I had seen. You Recently that they're now [00:18:30] rolling out a text based post option on the platform what it is exactly. I don't know if it accompanies a video or imagery at all, or if it is strictly just text.

[00:18:42] Yeah, I have to, yeah, if it's strictly text and yeah, definitely. Yeah. When you said Instagram, I realized that it's not the Twitter. It's much more of the Instagram post of, text on screen. kind of situation. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they integrate that because it is, [00:19:00] it's not really one I associate really with like text based reading.

[00:19:04] They've always been just video based and, that's always been their bread and butter. So introducing the text, I don't know what they're thinking there was were people just wanting to be able to because everybody was on this platform, be able to just like, spit something out in text and be able to post it on their platform.

[00:19:27] Who knows? Yeah, it's hard to say. And [00:19:30] also that they do still take stuff from their, the parent company, the Chinese ByteDance. They do like some of the stuff, like the e commerce one was, it was really popular with TikTok in China before it was ever even integrated here. And so I think that there's other, there's some aspects of like it having its own parent company that maybe they had a lot of success.

[00:19:51] So they've tested it out and figured out a way to implement because you Can collect a lot of data from a billion people using an app in China, and then try [00:20:00] to retrofit some of that stuff for TikTok over here. Yeah. I think we're done with social and AI, and maybe we just jump back onto search because we didn't mention about Google's shift from conversions to key events.

[00:20:17] And I know you probably have maybe a couple of things to mention about that. Yes, it's very annoying and I wish they had telegraphed it. It's just part of my larger change, just a wording change. So [00:20:30] there's more behind this, right? As far as I can tell, no yeah, cause basically conversions were just like, it has a special, it's an event that has a special attribute saying, is this a conversion true?

[00:20:42] And then, because if you have those, then what it does is it enables you to do conversion paths. So it's oh, this person before they converted, they like saw Facebook posts and they went to my website, then they saw like my Google ad and then they converted through. So really the, that's the core reason why you want to have these set up and why it [00:21:00] matters compared to, and I get it is a bit of a naming convention.

[00:21:03] It's just part of my larger grievance with Google is that they do a lot of changes to the platform, but they don't really do a good job of telegraphing or letting people know. And I remember you saying irrelevant stuff, they like will. Oh, their new login screen. They like, yeah, they like let me know that, Ooh, the login screen's changing.

[00:21:24] And then it was like, just a matter of two buttons were next to each other, nothing really else was on the page. It was [00:21:30] barely like worth of time to rewrite that code. There's moments like that where I'm just wondering, is this the best use of your resources? I was helping a customer yesterday with a bunch of their Google Google services, and both of us, by the end of our conversations and in dealing with this we're saying, we really hate Google.

[00:21:54] They make things so hard. Oh yeah. There's a bunch of stuff that they've just done. [00:22:00] Made worse and they just didn't like the improvements that they thought they made were not there like redoing the Google ads platform so it's like this Uncanny Valley where you it's similar to what how the old one was, but everything's a little bit off So you're like, how do I find where to do the policy manager?

[00:22:19] And then you're looking like a fool in front of your client when you're like, oh, I'm cool Trying to click around to find something, and it's I swear I know how to do this, they've just changed the platform on me. Yeah, so that, that part could be annoying. Yeah, [00:22:30] on to web stuff. We got three minutes to get through our web stuff.

[00:22:35] No WordPress 6. 5 was released I didn't see anything major with anybody upgrading however either In a subsequent release after they're at 6. 5. 2 [00:23:00] because there was a XSS vulnerability that was discovered and patched. And I know you mentioned, I didn't hear about this one, but one of the more popular page builders, Beaver Builder, We had one as well that you had seen.

[00:23:18] Yeah. Yeah. I saw the news on yeah, having two of those. They're coming on all the time. Security web security is always like a constant game of cat and mouse where you're trying to find every little vulnerability and Yeah, these things [00:23:30] happen and that's why we, it's good that the big ones get these because they can fix it.

[00:23:34] They have the resources to go and fix these issues and fix them relatively quickly. So just make sure you keep your stuff up to date folks. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And to finish off web stuff There were two acquisitions or purchases by WordPress of some interesting companies. One is a messaging app called beeper.

[00:23:58] And the other one is an all in [00:24:00] one messaging app called texts. com. So yeah, speculation on what WordPress has behind those acquisitions and what that could mean for something coming to WordPress. I. I haven't really thought about it too much, but it could be interesting with with those two acquisitions, what potentially might be coming to WordPress soon.

[00:24:25] Yeah, my gut's telling me that it's probably [00:24:30] SMS and multi channel messaging for especially WooCommerce. It'd probably be my guess. Yeah. Because that's the one that makes sense of I personally don't like it, but I know that it's very popular in the States to have texting for like updates about Or your packages or your product your order has been processed or, Yeah.

[00:24:51] And then later on, like you do text messages of Hey, this mother's day, don't forget to get a blah, blah, blah, click here. And then it like takes them to the website. [00:25:00] I don't like that functionality personally, but you know what the other people do. And I don't mind it for certain things. Because I find the text much less annoying than an email.

[00:25:17] Yeah I'm more of the opposite. So it's just more, it's personal preference, really. That's what it boils down to. And but yeah, I think that. Yeah, I think we're both at the same conclusion that it's got to be WooCommerce SMS [00:25:30] functionality and it makes sense that they would be marketing related stuff to add.

[00:25:35] And the chat stuff, maybe they'll try to incorporate their own chat into WordPress as opposed to having to use some chats are like to have the, would you like to talk to someone now thing, have that, have a feature like that directly built in with WordPress. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's [00:26:00] definitely, um, very conceivable in the future.

[00:26:03] But I guess with all of that being said, we are out of time. And if you have any other news or anything, feel free to post in the comments. We're happy to respond. You could join us over at cyberpunk geeks, marketing mixer where we continue this conversation and we'll also have a geek speak next week.

[00:26:22] Do you know the top? Yeah, it looks like Pip and Rena are going to be back and they're going to be chatting about Instagram and [00:26:30] Facebook strategies for 2024. Awesome. And that sounds, yeah, that sounds good. We'll be glad to have the ladies come back. But yeah, all that being said my name's Phelan. And I'm Greg. Thanks for joining us.

00:00 - Introduction to the Episode
05:00 - AI's Role in Enhancing Productivity
10:00 - Practical Uses and Limitations of AI
15:00 - Ethical Implications of AI Usage
20:00 - AI's Impact on the Marketing Industry
25:00 - Concluding Thoughts and Advice

[00:00:00] Hello there. It's that time, the week again we are doing Geeks week. Today we have a special guest. Of course, my name is Phelan with Seymour digital media, where we focus on search engine marketing. And my guest today is Ashley. Writer gal. Awesome. Yeah. And today we are talking about how you can use AI in your content marketing, like what are the best use cases for it?

[00:00:23] What's the, what kind of your do's and don'ts in order for you to optimize this as a tool to help you get more [00:00:30] work done and get it done properly and as well get the most out of it because the, these tools are super powerful, but they can also. Lead to some issues where people become over reliant or don't understand where it fits in to your workflow and getting a better understanding on that part.

[00:00:49] Yeah. And I know that's the huge thing is that it can fit into your workflows. It can support you, but it's not meant to replace you. I've been writing for 17 years, various stuff. [00:01:00] And it's only in the past few years, this has been a thing that people are asking about. I'm getting people that aren't even in my niche asking me, is AI going to replace your job, actually?

[00:01:10] And it's not if you use it in the right way, which, we'll have a chat about today. Yeah, exactly. I don't think that's the important part is understanding its context within your business and understanding that it is not going to solve every issue you've ever had. And it's not like a, like a silver bullet that's going to replace a bunch of stuff.

[00:01:29] Like it's meant to [00:01:30] extend your business. What your team's already doing, because you'll still need to have writers. And I know that we've had, we've heard the stories of the air Canada, where, they're on the hook all of a sudden because of a chat bot that they had and they didn't put set the correct prompts.

[00:01:44] They didn't verify things and they didn't have a person in the loop. Which is going to be super important to, I think it's going to be like the motto of what we're talking about today is that it's supposed to automate boring things, think of it like that, rather than [00:02:00] replacing my writer it's just mundane, repetitive tasks that, or, they're overly simple.

[00:02:05] I think that's the key cornerstone that we have when we're, when we prep for this today. And it's all about, not letting AI do it all. There's always going to need to be a human element. Checking it and testing it, like with that air Canada example, I can't remember exactly what they, what the bot promised them, but they were now on the hook, and we don't want anyone else to be on the hook for something that AI might've said about their business, [00:02:30] especially when you're writing about things like maybe healthcare or safety, if AI.

[00:02:36] Write something for you. That's not correct. And remember, you're the expert, you still need to have that eyes on it to make sure that AI is doing it right. There's the right way and the wrong way to do it. Yeah. And I've heard as well that like newspaper companies as well that are trying to replace full writers wind up spending as much time editing it down because it makes a bombastic claims that it just are not backed up by anything that they have.

[00:02:57] And so they have to retract because they're on the hook [00:03:00] as publishers that they don't want to libel anyone or anything like that. And so they understandably will edit those ones out. So I, I think that, yeah, understanding that it's not just like A perfect solution out of the box, but they, you need to also have it as part.

[00:03:15] Yeah. I think of it more of as a tool rather than a person I think it's the mental model that we're coming to. And so what are the, what are some of the uses that you've seen with using it? Yeah I think the biggest thing when it comes to creating any kind of [00:03:30] content, I focus on writing, but this can apply to.

[00:03:33] Videos, social media, anything is using it as a brainstorming tool. Phelan, like you mentioned, it's, we're looking for ways that we can use AI to save time. And when I'm teaching blogging, when I'm teaching writing sorry, one second, when I'm teaching writing, one of the joys of sharing an office, right?

[00:03:52] Yeah. Sorry. When I'm teaching writing, one of the big roadblocks people have is brainstorming, figuring out what to write, and that takes them [00:04:00] forever. But with an AI tool, I can type in one word and get You know, 10, 20, 30, as many as I want blog post titles or topics. And it's right there in two seconds.

[00:04:14] And then you can vet the ones that you like and move forward with that. So I definitely find that brainstorming, getting things going is a much, is a really great way to use AI. I don't know if you've used AI for that kind of brainstorming as well. Yeah. I think Pip [00:04:30] and I, Pip Morseau, sorry. My computer is very upset.

[00:04:34] I have to close some windows down because it is not happy camper right at the moment. Sorry about that. I'm seeing a bit of lag here too. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's my computer trying to do too many things at once. I yeah, okay. But yeah, what did yeah, Pip and I had used it to do stuff like find me five new things about something that I'd never heard about or something like that, where it's ones where you're trying to find, like, maybe edge cases of something or ones that are out [00:05:00] there that are, like, not You know, they're not normal ones that you would find and so there's definitely some Brainstorming is a good use case for it as well it's a really good one for first drafts as well just because I think you talked about writer's block as well because when you're looking at a blank page It's tough to get going Whereas if you use the ai to even just get something as a first draft, you go I don't agree with this paragraph, but then it gives you something to You Bounce off of and then rewrite it better So that you are not just staring at a [00:05:30] blank page where you can actually look at it and be like, oh, yeah Actually, I'd like this the way this is constructed.

[00:05:35] I would change these words You know, you like you have something to work with because I find that I'm better when I don't have you know blank page is hard to work with but even if it's a templated thing or something that I could just I have a much easier time going, I do, I agree with this.

[00:05:51] I like that. Maybe actually my research showed that this was actually going to be more of the case, but at least it's something that you could work off of and refine rather than [00:06:00] just start whole cloth yourself. Yeah, and I've used it two ways. I done, I said, Ask the AI to give me an outline for a blog article, which is really great.

[00:06:08] I can take and choose the outlines that I like, the subheadings, or write the first paragraph of a blog about this. It'll get my ideas going. I would never use that paragraph. I'd always rewrite it. But it really kicks off that, that blank page is very scary. Once you have, that outline and that's how I, even when I do it myself without using AI, I always [00:06:30] start with an outline.

[00:06:31] I say, okay, I've got 500 words, a thousand words. Here are my headings. I have approximately this many words for each heading. And it helps me organize my thoughts. And that's basically what AI is doing for me. And I pick and choose what makes sense for me. Starting a blog post, starting social media.

[00:06:48] I don't know. Phelan, have you guys ever used it for getting like ad copy or SEO keywords? Yeah, actually funny you mentioned that one. That was the most recent one. The Pips done is a really good use case for it [00:07:00] is to basically PIP Grabbed our search console data. So that's the stuff that we're showing up for in Google.

[00:07:06] She fed it into, fed it the CSV, cause on the chat GPT 4, you can feed it data. And then ask the question, find me the top keyword I would have for this page. And this is the title of the page and what it did, what it's, this is a really good use case for chat GPT 4. Chat GPT because there's a distinction with AIs.

[00:07:27] One is that there's one mode that's called [00:07:30] generative. So make me a picture that's of a dog eating a birthday cake. And it's going to generate you that image. So it, but it has to know what a dog is. It has to know what a cake is and know what eating is. And so it has to approximate that. Whereas if you say something like there's , selective or regressive AI, which is the, which is what most of these large language models, right?

[00:07:51] It takes a ton of information and it regresses it down to whenever you have this word follows it. That's what it does. But if you give it data and you say, [00:08:00] find me the keyword that's like I'm ranking for the best. That's one of its things that it will do really well with. And so you could use that information because it's computers are just good at algorithmically Grinding down something and being like, actually, we found this trend in the data.

[00:08:14] That's a strong suit. That's what it's really good for. So we've definitely used it for something like that. Ad copy, I found it to be, again, a good jumping off point. But I find it to be not as good as it thinks it is. Is what I would say. It gets a little repetitive. It gets a little it [00:08:30] uses certain verbs and certain adjectives.

[00:08:32] Like All the time, or at least that's been my experience is that you can feel that there's like a couple of words. We use it for our own and it wanted to give us like a nautical theme. And I didn't really get yeah, the ad copy was all like taking sale and like on your journey.

[00:08:46] And and it just decided that we were going to be a nautically themed company. And I didn't quite get why. . That goes to show, you don't just, Take what AI gives you blindly and put it on your website. Cause if you did, which a lot of business [00:09:00] owners do, they just take what AI gives them with the generative stuff, gives them and puts it on the site.

[00:09:05] And then they find out later, Oh Seymour digital isn't a nautical based company at all. Yeah, you got a fish and you live by the ocean. Yeah, that's no nautical theme to it. Yeah. Yeah. It was Yeah. It was like all the, yeah, the like calls to action were all very nautical. It was just a very, I didn't get where it came from with that one, but yeah, it was it was definitely an interesting one.

[00:09:27] I think also one other thing that kind of [00:09:30] came up when we were talking about this in the prep is that keeping the AI also constrained, like giving it a lot of constraints and like very small segmented parts, it's easier for it to do of only generate me generate me 200 headlines that are exactly 30 characters long.

[00:09:47] If you can get, it does a better job with that. Though I found also it doesn't, it likes to ignore character limits. If I give it to it, I feel like it'd be very specific. It's just make it 30 characters long and then it's 60 and I'm like that's No, 30 [00:10:00] characters and then it was 45 and I was like, okay, like seriously Oh, the AI is already rebelling against us, right?

[00:10:06] Yes, exactly. Oh dear. Which is also a funny thing that's come up as well is that on the forums I don't know if you've experienced it. We've done a couple of them With that the AI, like Chachupichu just doesn't want to do the work because it's been trained to be like a person. People don't always want to, they find excuses.

[00:10:23] And so apparently, like there's a lot of complaints on the forums of yeah, I asked it to generate me 30 images, it generated two and then told me to [00:10:30] finish the rest. There's, it's entertaining what's like the, how would I put it? The weirdness that comes out of AI because of you don't always know how the model is going to speak, give it back to you. And so sometimes it's it acts so much like a person that it's yeah, I don't want to work. You do the work. It's trying to keep us honest, maybe it's a good thing, because we shouldn't be relying on AI to do this.

[00:10:54] It's reminding us that, hey, we're real people here. We should be doing some of this work too. So I guess when you think about it, it's actually a [00:11:00] good thing that is not doing all the work for us. I think that Yeah, I think that a lot of, especially if you read like in the big newspapers and all that stuff, the way they talk about it is it's going to be, a great apocalypse.

[00:11:10] And I'm not of the opinion that it's going to be like coming for all our jobs and like it because, yeah, there's just there's just things like hard limitations on the amount of computing power that would be required to do that. Have all of us compute these things. It just would be like the numbers that they would require.

[00:11:28] Open AI is trying to get 10 [00:11:30] billion, $10 trillion to build out hold infrastructure networks to build out new data centers and all this stuff. And it's just the amount of what they require when they calculate it out, it's just gonna be so crazy that it would not, yeah, I'm starting to see a lot of articles and stuff online shop about the environmental impacts of using AI.

[00:11:49] We just use it thinking, Oh, we can just use it. It's online. It's on the computer. We don't think about, all the servers that you mentioned that they have to have. All the power that takes all of that computing power is going to be [00:12:00] damaging if we rely on it too much. If we use it too much for things that we don't really need to.

[00:12:05] Yeah, exactly. And as well that there's won't go into like rare earth metal stuff, but like those are. Difficult to get out of the ground. That's why they're called rare earth metals and they're difficult to get from places process All the stuff just to make a gpu to run these data centers I know that's gonna it's gonna be a huge one that is Gonna have a lot of long term effects and especially for the expansion that they want to do with [00:12:30] Ai It's going to be a lot of work but I think that, yeah I think, yeah, just being more thoughtful about how to use it in your mix of your business, I think is going to be a good one as well.

[00:12:44] I don't know about it like growing past this point like That's the part where I'm a little like I see it as a little bit plateauing a little bit Because to scale up more it's Gonna be crazy. We've got a question here as well How do we feel about training an [00:13:00] LLM, which is a large language model, which is what chat GPT and all these are basically, it's like a really large model of language and it knows things about it.

[00:13:10] So it's a great question. I don't know about like specific ones like the ODIN AI or Umbrel. I don't know about them specifically, but I think in general, I think that they, they have some really good things going for them. Because if you have a closed network, you're [00:13:30] the. It's one of those, like they, they say it in computer science is like garbage in garbage out.

[00:13:33] So if you give it bad data, you're going to get bad data out of it. So with these ones, I think that you can control what's going in and have it trained more to like your own separate data set, I think that would be, it'd be interesting and I think it could be good for businesses. I know that there's ones of like banks and insurance companies that have been using a lot of this as well.

[00:13:57] Cool. For just doing they're having to. Tons of [00:14:00] computation. So if you can get an algorithm or large language model to compute through a lot of this stuff, that's going to save you a lot of time. And so they only train it on their own, like privately held information versus the internet, which is, that's one of the big ones, right?

[00:14:13] It's like the more people are using this stuff, the more it's out there, the more that the chat to PT gets trained on. It's like a recursive loop of getting fed on its own. Giving it what they call like digital dementia where it's you're just getting fed your own part and it's not working as well.

[00:14:28] Yeah. I've had a client that [00:14:30] came to me recently with that and she had her own model. I can't remember what site she was using. She put in all of her like PDFs and all of her program information and the stuff that. Chat, or it wasn't chat GP, whatever the program was, whatever it was generating for her and content wise was factual, which was great, but it wasn't her.

[00:14:50] Like it included a little bit of her, the way she talks and from the language, but it still wasn't, it didn't include like the personal stories, the the human element of language, but [00:15:00] factually it was more correct than if I put the same prompt into chat GPT or something more generic. In that respect, it's good, but still I didn't take any of the content that gave me.

[00:15:10] I just rewrote it all in my own words, but it was, it was interesting thing to see how that works. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's, I think that's where the interesting part I've heard of some people even training it to sound like, themselves of here, read like a hundred blog posts that I've written.

[00:15:27] And it cuts, it's in their own voice that it [00:15:30] is super useful for them to be able to do that. And so they're saying that they are want to geek out more offline with PIP as well. I think there's an, they have a bunch of awesome comments. Thank you, Laura, for all these. And yeah, I think that this is, I think that this is a good way to do it.

[00:15:48] And I think that, cause that's a big one that's coming up as well is issues of copyright. A lot of what AI helps for businesses is I don't want to say like getting around copyright, but you could [00:16:00] be like who knows where it got all this information from?

[00:16:02] And so that's a big one that is, it's a big looming thing about AIs. Is that like how, attribution, who wrote this, like it and I know that there's been one court case that said if it's generated by AI, it technically doesn't have a copyright if it's like purely generative but then there's like the, how did it get trained?

[00:16:20] Who gave it that information, which is, I think that's a big one that it's not for me to decide, like I'm not a lawyer, I'm not, I don't run open AI, but that's definitely [00:16:30] one that is going to have to get figured out. And I think that's a big one that is, I don't know where that's going to shake out, but I think that's going to also really define the boundaries of it.

[00:16:41] Not only like we talked about physically, like how much it can compute, but also who's legally responsible for what it says and all that part. I think that's one that's going to be, I'm not, I don't envy the lawyers that have to figure that part out because that would, that it's a big headache that I don't want any part of.

[00:16:57] No, and what if somebody goes out there and they [00:17:00] probably have used AI to write a whole book and published it, what impacts does that have? That's why if you, like we talked about it before about using shorter bits of text. If you ask eight, I generate one sentence.

[00:17:14] Chances are, sentence structures can only go so far, so many different variations. There might not be, again, I'm not a lawyer. There may not be any copyright issues with one sentence that sounds like something else that's out there, as opposed to larger pieces of [00:17:30] text. So again, it goes back to Short text and rewriting still, adding your personal touches, personal perspectives to anything that AI generates for you.

[00:17:40] Yeah, I think that I totally agree with that, that it's, having it small and condensed and, using it for the brainstorming or like a short intro paragraph that you just kick things off I, I think that is, a good use. A good use and a good prompt, and it saves you from any issues later on because then you know that you [00:18:00] wrote it.

[00:18:00] You're not like I didn't even know you don't wanna be responsible for something. Or even if it made an, yeah, not an allegation, but maybe made it a, an unsubstantiated. Like assertion and then you're on the clock for being cited for that. And so it's definitely one where I think that will really help a lot of businesses just to not accidentally say something that they didn't mean to or double check.

[00:18:23] Even a way around that would be use AI for research as opposed to content generation. I do that for [00:18:30] clients that I don't know anything about their niche and I need some top resources or links or just, definitions of certain things, use AI for that instead of generating the content that you're going to use in the end result.

[00:18:42] Yeah. This was a interesting point as well, that I think yeah, I think that it's a good idea to treat it. Yeah, how to view the copyright. I think that, yeah, that's a good way to do this. I think that, yeah, there's going to be, I think there's going to be a lot of conversations between people [00:19:00] about figuring this part out.

[00:19:01] I was going to say I had a thought it evaporated from me at the last second. But yeah, I think that it is, Oh, I was going to say what you're saying also worked with, like I'd heard the content manager for mailer light. The email marketing platform that they, the way they were using it is basically they have they have the research and they know their voice and then what they do is they just get basically the AI kind of what we're talking about to do a first draft of Hey, write me an article about [00:19:30] why.

[00:19:30] Cosmetic companies are getting a 5 percent increase in their open rates because of this type of email and so they have the data They know that they're putting that in and then they just the it does the boring part of actually writing like a structure And then they go through and add their voice on top of it.

[00:19:45] And so it's a good workflow of it's not It's like to me. That's a really good use case where you've got your fax, right? You've got voice, you and then the boring part of like actually writing out like A boring article that like, you've got to hit these points and it's [00:20:00] just that's the fun part That's the part.

[00:20:01] I like the writing part I'm a weird breed though Yeah no, it's good Like I think that and if that's what you're looking for like obviously you're using it for your own way That I think it's like looking at it as part of your workflow and how you work with it I think that's going to be the most important part I and I think that the other part that's going to be interesting as well is that google Didn't officially say but they've basically said that like It's good.

[00:20:28] There's so much AI content now [00:20:30] that they can't really distinguish the two. It's just so much. And because it's like a, because it's like a regressive, like an algorithm, they would use a regressive algorithm as well to be like, okay, in our large language model, we found that these words all came together, but it's it's becoming so much that they just can't even detect it.

[00:20:47] So that's going to be, as humans, I feel like, when you're reading something, you can definitely feel when they, Yeah, you could, it's just one of those weird things that humans do well of that uncanny valley where it's just it's close, but it's not [00:21:00] quite like I, why would a person say it this way kind of thing?

[00:21:03] Yeah. And people are smart. People know, they may not know what's wrong with the copy, but they'll read it, whether it's your website, your blog, your social media, and they'll just get that feeling that this isn't right. This isn't on brand. This doesn't sound like. The person behind the business and that, that really stands out, and I think maybe one way to get around not get around that.

[00:21:23] That's not the right word. One way to make it sound less AI is that if you do use portions of AI is to work in those stories [00:21:30] that AI doesn't know about, if you were to do a, write something about today's thing about today's live, we would be throwing in our own ideas and stuff like that.

[00:21:39] Our own stories. Like we've thrown in stories that we've heard in the news. I've thrown in stories from my business. And that will make it sound less robotic, AI still sounds, even if you ask it to be light and cheery, it still sounds robotic a lot of the time, people know, people will see that.

[00:21:54] Yeah. Or like a twee is another emotion that I noticed a lot with it, [00:22:00] where it gives me like a, Oh boy, like responses. And it's just it feels inauthentic, but that's because the machine wouldn't know that is. Would come across as inauthentic. They're just trying to be positive and happy and then but they don't get that It sounds like overly sincere.

[00:22:16] And so it comes across as insincere to people because most people are just using Yeah, or just have more world experience than the AI does and doesn't know how interactions on an emotional level work. And [00:22:30] so that's a limitation that it has. And that's just the brass tacks of it.

[00:22:33] And I think that yeah, I think ultimately like I would say yeah, it's not, I don't think it's coming for your jobs. I don't think it's coming. It's going to be the end of the world. Even looking at the example of the. Amazon grocery store remember the one that you could walk in and walk out?

[00:22:49] And it, they're just saying that it was all AI. And then it turns out like, no, it was thousands of people in India watching the cameras. And then I'm manually like charging people and it was, they, [00:23:00] yeah. Yeah. So like the AI vision of where like businesses think it's going to be and what it's going to do just doesn't line up with kind of the limitations.

[00:23:08] I think that it, yeah, I think that. ultimately it's just one that we're just going to be able to use. It's just like a easy automation tool. I think personally, that's where I see it really, it's future is not like taking over, but basically just fitting into the slot of all of our tech tools and how we use them, I think is a easier way to conceptualize it.

[00:23:29] Yeah, it's [00:23:30] like I said in the beginning, it supports content creation. It supports our businesses, but it's never going to replace us. We were always needed. And yeah, from people like me, I'm getting those questions all the time. So I have to have those responses on why they should hire me and not trust the AI.

[00:23:45] So it's adding a little bit more work to my plate now, but people are, AI has been around for content generation for, a couple of years now, the past year, really. And people know people understand that. And if your budget is a little bit shorter, you're a new business.[00:24:00]

[00:24:00] Maybe you might rely on a little bit more starting out, but as you grow, as you build into your own voice and your own perspectives and experience, you can start to pull away from relying on AI and using more copywriters, using your own voice and content. Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it is, making your own resources go farther if you've got tight budgets, if you've got, you can look at this as a way to spread it out a little longer, make things work a little better because yeah, you're going to have a lot of, [00:24:30] you may have constraints or something.

[00:24:32] But yeah, I think that, looking at it more pragmatically as like a, a glue that fits into gluing more spots together than it is a replacement for whole departments. I think that's just optimizing business practices. What we're all learned when we learn about business, look for ways that you can optimize.

[00:24:47] I think this is one way we can. It's just, again, with the warning, don't rely on it as, don't fire all your employees and replace them with the AI. It won't last long. Yeah. Yeah. And it just won't, it [00:25:00] won't be as good as we expect. And yeah, there's a lot of comments here from Laura as well.

[00:25:06] I'll just add this one. It gets comical. Yeah. It totally does. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely, yeah. It has some issues that come out to the fore. And yeah, I think yeah, I think we got a good spot with it. I think that we looked, we're, I think both of us are going to be using it.

[00:25:25] I think that. It's just going to be more fit more as like a tool in our arsenal. [00:25:30] Then, yeah, I think that's where I see it's coming up. Compared to like, where, the hype, like of what people think that it's going to be. I just don't see it there. Yeah. I'm in complete agreement.

[00:25:41] No, let's use it to support us, to help us all grow and scale our businesses, but not replace us. It never will. I don't think it will. Yeah, I agree. All right. So I guess we will close it out there. It's been a great talk, Ashley. And again, my name is Phelan with Seymour Digital Media. And I'm Ashley at [00:26:00] WriterGal Marketing.

[00:26:01] Awesome. Bye for now.

0:00:00 - Introduction to URL Redirects
0:00:36 - Discussing 302 Temporary Redirects
0:01:21 - Use Cases for 302 Redirects in E-commerce
0:03:02 - Marketing Campaigns and Redirects
0:05:00 - Shopify and Redirect Limitations
0:09:33 - 301 Permanent Redirects Explained
0:11:00 - Meta Refresh and JavaScript Redirects
0:15:00 - Advanced Uses of JavaScript Redirects in Marketing
0:20:30 - Maintenance and Management of Redirects
0:25:00 - Closing Remarks and Future Topics

[00:00:00] Hello, it's the time of the week again, it's time for Geek Speak. And today we are talking about redirects kind of what are they, why you should use them, and why they're super important for your website in your, all your marketing. And to do that today I'm speaking to you, Phelan Lewis from Seymour Digital Media, where we focus on search engine marketing and I'm Greg McKinnon with Original 72 Creative, and we're a full service website graphic design and digital marketing firm in Vancouver. Awesome. Today, this is a [00:00:30] topic you brought up, but I think we we did touch on this a little bit when we were talking about error messages, because they're interrelated.

[00:00:36] But I think we were going to touch on that. Coming up with my blog, I was like, why did I put this one right after the error? Because we just touched on a bunch of it, but yeah, whatever. Yeah, but there's also some fun stuff of we were talking about like the 302 redirects. And when we you and I both independently dug into it, I ran into it with a client.

[00:00:57] Of a use case for a 302, which is the [00:01:00] temporary redirects. And so why we would do that, because both of us are Oh, this seems stupid. Then we looked into it and there's Oh, That's a cool use case. So like for myself, it was a client that had e commerce and an in store, like they had a brick and mortar location as well, and so they would, sometimes run out of products, but they knew they're going to be getting more next month, so it's just a temporary redirect.

[00:01:21] So they just telling Google Oh we're out of this. There'll be more coming. And you know to google that makes a lot of sense because it's oh, that's not this page isn't totally going away [00:01:30] It's just going to come back You know in a couple weeks and so they'll still have a you know Just check on it and then see how it's going first.

[00:01:36] It's like this page has gone away. It's never coming back Yeah you know how? Up further the longest time companies that I've worked with have had, promotions or anything going on in their business. Sometimes we've created a separate landing page for, whatever specific that they're trying to plug at that time [00:02:00] or sell or, and it never really occurred to me because basically when you put out things, you're like directing everybody to that specific landing page for that campaign that you've got going on. But it never really occurred to me that page. Also probably has its own product page on their website, right?

[00:02:23] And so that would be one of the things that you could do is instead of having the landing page [00:02:30] and your normal product page for whatever that product or service is, you could put in that 302 redirect on that so that all traffic goes to this marketing campaign landing page. You've got set up. Instead of splitting up your traffic between, people that just happened to hit that page on your site for the normal product and the campaign specific campaign landing page that you've created and then remove [00:03:00] it when your campaign is done.

[00:03:02] And and that flows all of your traffic that was going to go to that other page your normal page to that. Landing a page for that marketing purpose. Yeah. I think that makes sense as well. And it just dawned on me as you were explaining that, I guess you could also do multiple products as well.

[00:03:22] Maybe you're doing like a big bundle sale and it's Oh no, you're going to go to The, the once a year bundle page. And so because of that, they can [00:03:30] get redirected there from the two like product pages that you are bundling, or, I'm just using an example.

[00:03:36] The other one that came to mind when we, you're you were explaining it a little bit, it was that we could have as well as like temporarily changed like the URL and the button. The whole look at the page it's not even necessarily a new page, but maybe you've done a big update and you've updated the, the URL and the page title meta description.

[00:03:52] And so it looks like it's a brand new page, but really what you've done is you updated it for I don't know, like your summer sale and it has like summer sale, whatever [00:04:00] product name is. And then so it's not, It's temporary in the sense that you don't want to it's the sales temporary, but the product page is going to go back.

[00:04:08] And then so Google still maps out your URLs correctly from where it's supposed to be. Yeah, it gets you an easy way to direct people to the page that you want specifically, but not lose any of that. Organic placement or authority with the current page that Google [00:04:30] knows because it has seen this, that you're going to go back to it.

[00:04:34] So it just doesn't, it basically just doesn't do anything with it. It ignores it because it knows that it's going to come back at some point. Yeah. And I think that it also helps with Google of knowing the flow of your website, right? You don't want that hard breaks like Googled, it's an algorithm that's trying to figure out how to lay us out all in context.

[00:04:51] And if we make it easy, it's Oh no, so we're going to temporarily be over here and like that. So they know how all these things flow together. I think Google's [00:05:00] always appreciative of that part of it as well. Yeah, we jumped into the 302 temporary redirects there and skipped over the 301 because I think.

[00:05:09] 302s, now that I know a lot more about them I find them more interesting and I'm like, look, find myself looking for how can I use this now? I really want to, I really want to use it. But the 301, go ahead. I just want to say sorry about the 301 redirects. One other thing that I found [00:05:30] that's annoying, but it's the fact that, Shopify is 20 years old and changing this now is going to be hard, but they don't enable, they don't allow you to do three, one redirects, or you're only allowed to do three, one redirects.

[00:05:39] 302 is just weren't written in to any of the software protocols. And so just one thing to keep in mind, if you do have a Shopify store and you're like, why can't I set up a 302? It's by default. It's just the way their system was. It's you have a 20 year old system and there's so many people on the platform that changing something like that might break a lot of their website.

[00:05:59] So I [00:06:00] understand back in 2004, 2006, when they were first building this, that they weren't really thinking we should have all these, make sure all this is set up. Just one thing, I just, it was a quick aside that I wanted to throw in there. Of the infrastructures there for 301s, they shouldn't have too difficult a time implementing 302s, you would think.

[00:06:21] And I'm sure eventually they're probably looking at doing that. Yeah, it, from my understanding, having I got to [00:06:30] Peek at the code base for how the how Shopify operates and it's a lot of the fact that it's like a mono Like each technically each individual store is like it's an instance of the Shopify and it has and so it's got a bunch of just weird stuff of like being a monolith code base as well that it's like it and The way that the ruby on rails was off the way they customize it off the get go It just there's some weird things with Making changes about URL structures is [00:07:00] weird.

[00:07:00] And it's my understanding from talking to some of the guys that work on the backend that things that seem simple, but because there's so many instances, things can get really weird really quickly. And so they've tried to make changes to like how the URL shaped and all that stuff. And it's just, it causes a lot more headaches than you would expect when you're, because of the way they've done the code base.

[00:07:22] And it's sometimes they're just like, it's the juice worth the squeeze and they're they're just think of it as a settled [00:07:30] issue. And they're just, we can't do that. Okay let's just move on with new apps and like extending the functionality. I get that because the platform we built at my first business was a platform, much like Shopify was where it was one code base, but you could have multiple Customers all on that same code base with separate sites.

[00:07:53] So making a change to that one application does [00:08:00] affect every site on on the platform. And I, yeah, when you, it Rang a bell in my head, thinking back, yeah, just the PTSD of some of the small things that we were like, Oh, we'll just do that. And we're like, Oh crap. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of those like a wooden puzzle pieces where you're like, you push one and it like, put you're trying to move them all around.

[00:08:26] And you just okay, now I've got this here. Okay. But now this has been [00:08:30] affected by that. And you're like, it's like this Rube Goldberg machine kind of situation that you got going on. Yeah, I don't wanna get too off topic there, but I didn't ever think of Shopify in that way. But they're really like a shared host, right?

[00:08:43] Like you, it's one platform with multiple clients all on the same platform, like sharing the same platform itself. So yeah, A as well. And then just on top of that is that they also have apps that all have to integrate with their systems. So they've got a lot [00:09:00] of people that they need to coordinate with.

[00:09:02] And so it's definitely, it's the same as like WordPress, right? People always complain that WordPress has all these old things and old systems in it. And and it's just a function of, it was 20 years ago that they started this. And now we know more about how you would set it up from scratch. But the problem is like, it's now a legacy system.

[00:09:18] And so making big sweeping changes is difficult because it can break a third of the internet. And that's a big thing that they have to contend with. And so I Yeah, I know we've gone a little far afield, but I think it does matter to [00:09:30] like, why do these things why are these things set up this way?

[00:09:33] And it points back to that, we're dealing with the end of it. Yeah. So let's get back on track here and let's get back to the 301 redirects which are permanent redirects. And for anybody who. Is not fully aware of what 301 redirects are is basically, it's a way to permanently redirect from an old page on your website to a new [00:10:00] page on your website, if you are.

[00:10:02] Rebuilding that page or, rebuilding your website or whatever it is for SEO purposes and usability cause nobody likes hitting a 404 page is to throw in a 301 redirect of what that old page URL used to be to the new page that you've built in your site. Yeah, exactly. A good place.

[00:10:28] If you're ever wondering rather than you [00:10:30] just poking around, what are the 404s that are on my website? What we use is search console's really good at telling you that we scanned your page again You used to have a page that was called, Meet the team and now it's and but they don't they just know it's broken.

[00:10:42] And so you go to the in coverage and then index and on the left hand side, and that'll tell you number four, four, soft four, four is 500, anything like that. So it's a really search console is a really good tool for that part. I know just quick plug PIP next week is going to be doing a YouTube [00:11:00] live all about search console.

[00:11:01] And so I think that there'll be some coverage in there about that. So stay tuned. So yeah we'll go over maybe 301 redirects a little bit more further in to the episode. There's two other redirects that are not commonly used or at least not commonly used for people who just have a basic websites.

[00:11:25] One is a meta refresh redirect. And what a [00:11:30] meta refresh redirect is, you can put a meta tag in the header of your website that will refresh that page that you've landed on to another page that you'd prefer them go to. I never thought of these as the same as a 301 redirects. But I guess they are similar.

[00:11:56] They do replace or another option for 301 and [00:12:00] 302 because they basically function the same way. It basically will land on that page and instantly redirect you to another URL that you want them to go to. People typically do the meta refresh directs. If they don't have access to their server or have a way to create proper 301 or 302 redirects, and maybe they have access to just throw that tag [00:12:30] into their HTML, so the page redirects but otherwise there's not a ton of use cases for it unless unless you don't have access to create 301 or 302 redirects.

[00:12:43] Yeah. The only, oh, so just going off that, I think that the biggest difference between what's the 301 and the meta rewrite is who's doing the work of the redirect. So if it's the 301, then it's a server side. So you've called to the server and said, I want to get this [00:13:00] URL. And then the server says back to them, oh, you mean this URL.

[00:13:03] So it's like the client, like the browser hasn't done any work. It's just been. it just redirects on its own. And then, so that's my understanding where it's like the meta redirect is more like your browser gets a signal and in this, in the signal that it's getting, there's a little thing that says, Hey, actually we want you to go over here.

[00:13:23] And so it's actually a double page load, right? Because the meta refresh happens on the page [00:13:30] that you don't want them to to go to anymore and directs you to the new page. So that page does start to load. And as soon as it hits that meta tag, it will then immediately just go to that other page. Back in the day when things were slower, you could actually see the page start to render and then flip To the page that you actually wanted it to go to.

[00:13:56] Yeah. That was always fun. I used to use these [00:14:00] a lot when I did flash. Oh wow. That's going back. Yeah. Yeah, this is going back to early mid 2000. Yeah, definitely. And a lot of the time there were the phase when everybody was doing these intros for 10, 15, 20 seconds, whatever.

[00:14:22] That sometimes you would need a refresh in there if you if you wanted to skip it [00:14:30] or after the. After it was over if there wasn't a call in the, or something worked into your flash that automatically sent you, you could put a meta refresh on the page that was delayed after 15 seconds or something.

[00:14:48] Or if it was just a page that wasn't flash, but you wanted this page to come up with something, but then immediately send them somewhere else, that was the way you did it, a meta [00:15:00] refresh, right? So a page would load, you'd have this message or your logo thanks for. Thanks for visiting us and like after five or 10 seconds, the page just automatically sends them to, the actual homepage or something to make it that this was, this was the way to make websites fancy back in the day.

[00:15:19] Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking man, that's just like quick aside. It reminds me of this website called most annoying JavaScript, something like that. It's a guy decided to find every weird feature that of [00:15:30] JavaScript. And it basically made makes for a very annoying. But yeah, it's just reminds me of, yeah, those old, what we used to think web development was like back in the day compared to like now or it's a lot more standardized. Yeah. And then, so moving on to the last one is JavaScript redirects. I've not ever really used JavaScript redirects. I'm. Assuming they have their, main purposes, but essentially they do the same thing but [00:16:00] it's all executed on the client side and not on the server side much the meta refresh is.

[00:16:06] Have you come across transcript redirects much? Yeah I did, but I didn't know that's what they were using until you showed, until I read the description. I was like, Oh, that was Google optimize where it did A B testing on landing pages. And so you would change like a headline or something like that.

[00:16:24] And so it would use JavaScript to just at the last second go, okay, it was really good with [00:16:30] Google ads because you could have specific campaigns or specific ad groups that they would see a different landing page or a different, slightly different landing page text, or maybe an image, a coupon code, there's stuff like that.

[00:16:42] So there was a really cool use case. The other one that was cool from the Google optimize is you could also do UTM parameter. So you could have the medium and you set the medium. So you could have email marketing and like they click on the email, they come to the landing page and they get, they see the little coupon code.

[00:16:57] Whereas no one else would, because they, it would have had the [00:17:00] UTM parameter. So there were some cool, like marketing use cases of AB testing was a big one. And yeah, like personalization or yeah, that extra bit that. The JavaScript redirects, would be things that people don't, aren't even aware are being used to do certain functions on the site.

[00:17:21] Like you mentioned and they're. I never even thought that they would be used as well for that A B testing. I never really thought about [00:17:30] how A B testing works. It's just Oh yeah, they'll serve one. Then they'll serve the other. You don't really think about behind the scenes, how they're actually accomplishing that, but it makes perfect sense.

[00:17:40] The other thing JavaScript redirects might be doing are, if you're coming from a certain location, certain country, they might have those things in there to send you to that specific country's website, for instance those type of things. Or the other one that I just, as you said that, it [00:18:00] just dawned on me, because I'm going through this torturous process of the, those consent banners.

[00:18:04] And so we have a client that is, they're pretty international, but they're headquarters here in British Columbia. But Quebec and California have a similar level of consent. compliance required as GDPR, but they don't want to have the banner show up for every single one of them. So I'm going to wager that probably the banner, and you can do it, that it's IP compliant.

[00:18:26] So provided that the person is in those areas, [00:18:30] when they access the website, the banner will show up. And if they're not in that area, the banner won't show up. So I would probably wager that it's going to be the JavaScript, pretty much does this enable yes or no. And it's based on, Oh, they're coming from Quebec.

[00:18:42] Okay. Yeah. Then we activate it. Oh, they're coming from BC. Nope. Don't activate it. And that's probably how that's working to some extent. Yeah. The use case for the JavaScript option is as I think about it pretty wide and I think of it more, um, maybe [00:19:00] more in a way of, um, not in the traditional redirect way, but it's because when I think of redirects, I think more of the 301 redirects where you're changing your URL structure and, or pages and things like that, this is the JavaScript redirects are for a complete different purpose.

[00:19:19] It's more for a usability. UX a feel where you want certain things to show up or certain places to be gone to on your website [00:19:30] based on customer information or customer location, that type of thing. So I think that's why I never really thought too much. More about it as a redirect.

[00:19:40] Yeah. Yeah, like it's definitely one that like the more I we've been talking about the More i'm like, oh, yeah, that probably is that there's just like things that show up that like compliance is going to be a big one, Not every area is going to have the same laws and just like the consent So you may have some things that like you can't show a certain image and you might want to remove a certain image because it Won't be compliant [00:20:00] with that area Maybe language as well.

[00:20:03] I could imagine that you would want to have like You We can't say these certain things in the EU that we can in the U. S. So we're gonna make sure that if they are coming from the EU that, take out these words. Like I could definitely yeah, there's a bunch of like weird edge case stuff that for, but yeah, I think it's just Take personalizing it to the user.

[00:20:23] I think that's a big use case for these ones as well. So, , I wouldn't say off of that just now that, [00:20:30] cause I think we're going to be switching over to some of the things to watch out for, right? That's where I feel we're good. Cause yeah, but not maybe watch out for, I don't know. Do I have a watch out for it?

[00:20:41] It's yeah one of the big ones that I ran into a lot with using Google optimize was performance issues. Because JavaScript takes a while to load, takes a while to run, and so the browser is going to be only able to do so much work. Don't over rely on something that uses JavaScript to do things, and your website still be per performing super well, [00:21:00] because definitely Yeah, it can cause some issues with load speeds, especially on mobile.

[00:21:05] That's when I really noticed it. Yeah, I was going to move on to like maintenance of redirects and things like, because I was thinking 301 is a permanent redirect. And I was thinking like, do you just have it forever? Cause I, cause at a certain point you're going to have so many redirects.

[00:21:28] In there, which [00:21:30] also in itself is not a great thing for Google to see that there are a ton of redirects on your set up on your site. So like the maintenance Of the redirects and how long you should, keep a 301 redirect in there. And I think that really comes down to having something set up like search console, where you can see are people still hitting this old site?

[00:21:57] Is it basically gone from the search engine [00:22:00] and, all people are going to the new page, then, maybe you could think about getting rid of that redirect because of the impact on your SEO or people not finding it is so minute by that time, I would definitely keep things for, minimum a year before, maybe checking on them to see, but.

[00:22:20] I would definitely go in and keep track of what you've got set up. I've come across instances where people have had [00:22:30] a redirect for a page to go to a new page. And then later on, they've created a redirect from that other page to go to a new page. So the, so now there's like a redirect from one old page to whatever their new page was.

[00:22:47] And then they're like, they did it again. They're like, I'm going to change it again. So now they have, so following things like that, I'm assuming that's more what Google is like, Hey, there's too many redirects here. I'm going from here to here. Yeah, [00:23:00] a lot of paid people. Yeah, exactly.

[00:23:03] And yeah, it's definitely, I was going to say that's a big thing to watch out for is chaining your 301 redirects, Google, anything more than one Google is not a happy camper about another cool feature is if you get some of the ones, the tools, like a redirect manager, Or 3 1 easy redirects for Shopify these, all these apps all have the same sounding name.

[00:23:24] It's so hard to keep track of which one's which. But they one thing they do that's good that you were talking about [00:23:30] is that they do count if they get hit, like if it, the 3 1 redirect got triggered. So that way you can get a sense of oh, people are still getting redirected here.

[00:23:38] And so it's a way that you can keep track of that as well. So just super useful for you doing that. Yeah. Be mindful of what you're setting up for redirects and just take an audit every once in a while and make sure things haven't gotten crazy. And most of the tools like we'll go over a couple of tools, at least for [00:24:00] WordPress.

[00:24:00] There's a plugin. Yeah. Commonly used called redirection. I think it's probably the most common one that people use. There's another called simple 301 redirects. And then obviously if you're using Yoast or RankMath, both of those have redirect options within them. For I guess for WordPress, if you are, using Yoast or RankMath already, don't, you might as well use the redirection features in those, [00:24:30] instead of installing a separate plugin just to do redirects.

[00:24:33] If you're not using those, you can use redirection or 301 simple 301 redirects. And the good thing about these is you can create them in your admin. You can see the stats on like how many actually, I think you can, in some of them, at least you can see. The information about how many times they're still being hit and forwarding traffic along.

[00:24:58] But you can see them [00:25:00] right in your dashboard, in your admin and maintain them easily like that. So it's it's really convenient to use one of these for sure. Yeah. They're really useful. The, and for Shopify, I just use the easy redirects is in what name of the one I use. It's never seared me wrong.

[00:25:19] Works really easily. That's the same thing. And it's free. It does have a paid tier if you want, but it's not required. I've gotten everything I needed out of it with just a symbol, just the [00:25:30] free tier. So, yeah to wrap to wrap up on three on redirects I hope people got some good information here.

[00:25:38] And if you're not using 301 redirects, definitely. Consider doing them, especially if you're doing a lot of work on your site, because it is going to any changes you're going to make to your site where you create new pages or change things, it is going to impact your SEO. So using the redirect options is really going to save you there.

[00:25:59] And I know you'll [00:26:00] probably harp on people as, the SEO guys. Yeah. And it's literally the first thing we check when we're going to like first, like the highest prior priority in any website, and this will happen with website, if you've had your website for more than a year, you are I will wage your money and you've done anything on the website with a content or plugins, anything like that.

[00:26:21] You will have a 404 on your website. Like you may not have a ton, but like almost always every website, it's just natural that people get [00:26:30] them. And it's not the end of the world. We just got to make sure that they're fixed and set it up a through one redirect. And yeah, just take a quick audit, use your search console and just Use a free plugin and just get started fixing this.

[00:26:42] Even I came across this because as a web developer, I typically put a site by my business at the bottom kind of a thing not on all sites, but on, on a lot of client sites, I'll have that. And I myself [00:27:00] changed one of my pages on my site to optimize it to be better, but then forgot Oh man, at the bottom of a lot of these sites.

[00:27:09] They're going now to a dead link. And so I didn't catch that for a little bit until I actually looked at my, my Google console or stats. I was like, why are these all these 401s that, Oh, I changed that page, right? Yeah. Yeah. It'll happen. And yeah, especially if you're not keeping track of that stuff.

[00:27:27] And yeah, you definitely, you want to keep [00:27:30] track of that. I think also as well, some of those, Plugins when you do the paid tiers, they also will do a 404 tracker So if people hit a specific 404 you could get notified ahead of it. So it's not like you can fix it even sooner but I would definitely yeah, just get started fixing broken links and make sure your website's Nice and clean.

[00:27:48] But that is it. We are over time and Just to say the thanks for watching. Let us know in the comments. If you have any questions about redirects or if there's anything that [00:28:00] you have, expand on further, we're happy to answer it in the comments. We're at cyberpunk marketing, cyberpunk geek marketing mixer.

[00:28:08] And if you want to join us next week Phelan, you're going to be on with a guest, Ashley. Your guys topic is ethical use of AI in your marketing. Yeah. Should be, it'd be nice to see Ashley. She was a regular for for a little while with us. Yeah. Yeah. I think that she's it should be a really exciting conversation.

[00:28:27] I know that the, the AI world is still growing [00:28:30] and still figuring out the contours of it. So I think that will be an exciting conversation. All right. Till next week. Thanks everyone. Bye.