66 - Common Digital Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid

Episode Transcript:

Rich: Caitlin, I'm so excited!

Catelin: You are?

Rich: I am because we're doing, we're doing the cocktail that I was shocked we hadn't done in over 50

Catelin: episodes.

Rich: So.

Catelin: I like that it is November and we are drinking summer cocktails and, uh, it's, it was 80 degrees here yesterday. So it's not like totally out of pocket. But, uh, you know, an Aperol spritz in November, what's not to love?

Catelin: I have seen some fun, like, fall twists on this, too.

Rich: Oh, yeah, 100%. I actually have.

Catelin: Could do a little riff.

Rich: We went to Wall to Wall Wine, who should also send us money and endorse us. Hy Vee, are you listening? Send us money. They have a pre mixed Aperol spritz, like, in a bottle. That's like the Aperol and the Prosecco together, that is still in the fridge.

Rich: I haven't tried it because I just, it was highly recommended from someone and they said like in a pinch, because you know, the problem is you, you buy the Prosecco and if you don't buy the little splits, you've, those are expensive. You buy the big bottle, you don't drink it all. Well, some people don't drink.

Catelin: I don't. Problem. Okay. Yeah. Alright. . Yeah. So, uh, I'm told that that can be an issue.

Rich: I, however, I've heard that as well. It's not, not one to which I can, I didn't have any wine yesterday by the, like, no wine at all yesterday. Are you okay? Which was interesting for me. Yeah, I'm fine. I just didn't feel like it.

Rich: Uh, we had burgers last night and I was just like, eh, I don't wanna open something nice for a burger. I just want to drink my water and call it a day. Mm-Hmm. . Um. So we're like a minute and a half into this. We should probably tell people we are talking about common digital marketing pitfalls that you can avoid.

Rich: So there is useful information here aside from summer cocktails in fall. Uh, but honestly, like, um, you're probably here for the cocktail. Yeah. Um,

Catelin: I don't know. Maybe it's both. Two things can be true at the same time.

Rich: Yeah. So, I mean, we've seen a lot of stuff from people where they come to us to fix a problem.

Rich: We've had a lot of those, which is kind of wild. Like, hey, why am I, like, not getting any search results? And it's like, oh, because whoever did this before did these horrible black hat tactics for you. So we're going to give you some warning signs so you can come to us with a positive story and say, Hey, I want to, my marketing's doing really good.

Rich: I just want to make it great. Yeah. Let's turn it up a notch. Yeah. Um, so yeah, so yeah, I mean, and this is such a simple classic. I love it, Caitlin. And this is the original.

Catelin: What does D O C stand for in Prosecco?

Rich: Uh, I don't know.

Catelin: Okay. D

Rich: O C. It's probably a, is it a region thing? Three ounces

Catelin: of Prosecco, D O C, probably.

Catelin: Shall we Google?

Rich: Um, I'll Google. You keep reading.

Catelin: Okay. So, um, you are looking for three ounces of Prosecco, D O C. You can also measure this with your heart if you want. Two ounces of Aperol, uh, and one. Splash of soda and you're going to garnish that with an orange slice. So you just, uh, place your ice cubes in a stemmed balloon glass or a wine glass.

Catelin: If you have, you know, glassware restrictions for three parts of your Prosecco, two parts of Aperol and one part soda. One. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So you don't have to, you could do this in a pitcher if you wanted to. Uh, you could do it. Just parts is easier than maybe ounces in this case. Uh, and then slice an orange and use it as a garnish.

Rich: Yeah, so it is designation of controlled origin. So basically they're saying get the real Prosecco, don't get the fake stuff. It's sort of, um, so Prosecco can be made other places, I believe, and still be called Prosecco. But the DOC implies that it is the highest quality.

Catelin: Um,

Rich: there's also a DOCG. Um, which I think is the next one down.

Rich: Um, I didn't read all of that while you were doing the recipe. It's a very

Catelin: short recipe.

Rich: Basically, I know, right? I'm like, ah, where is that one from a few, few weeks ago that was like 43 ingredients? Um, it's basically saying like, simple syrup,

Catelin: vanilla, simple syrup, never again. Oh, get a, I know. Get, yeah, get

Rich: a nice original Prosecco from Italy.

Catelin: Ideally, like if I was gonna recommend one, it would be LaMarca. That's our kind of our cost. Lamar is an

Rich: easy one, and you can get that Costco everywhere. It's, yeah, it's everywhere. Um, you can buy it by the case at Costco, it's like 5 99 a bottle or so something. Um, what, but it's good

Catelin: at Costco.

Rich: Oh yeah. The LaMarca, the purple bottle or the blue bottle.

Catelin: Right. Blue. They're usually like 16 bucks at the lowest. I've ever seen them. Maybe it's their purple

Rich: Kirkland one I was probably the same thing, but I don't know I do love this because like you said you can measure all of this with your heart You want a little more bubbly more Prosecco. You wanted a little more like sharp more Aperol splash of soda sometimes optional

Catelin: Skip it.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, it's, it's usually better with it.

Catelin: Yeah. And if you want to, if it's like, you're going to do a little patio pounder, then probably include your soda. But, uh,

Rich: so it's fun cause we're doing marketing pitfalls and we were able when we were in Rome last, when we were in Italy, we drink, we drink Aperol spritzes all the time in Italy of course, but we, we just got tired one day and so we just sat down at a cafe outside the, um, Oh, it's the Vittorio something something, they call it the typewriter, uh, look up the monument, the typewriter Rome, but it's just basically it's a big building that looks like a typewriter.

Rich: It's got like edges in the back and then lower steps in the front of it. And so we were just on this square, like watching all the traffic zip by with no. Traffic control whatsoever. Just nobody hit anybody, but it was great. Um, enjoying that. But I was thinking about when we went to the Coliseum and a pitfall, like they actually had pits in the Coliseum.

Rich: Like it's a raised floor. So you could

Catelin: just drop you if you don't do what you're supposed to do in the gladiator arena. They'll just, they'll just throw you through the hole in the floor.

Rich: Yeah, they were restoring the wooden floor when we were there. Um, it was really, really neat. And there were rumors that they may actually hold events there, but I can't see that happening.

Rich: Like, that would just be too much wear and tear on a building that's been around for hundreds of years. Thousands. Thousands of years. Thousands. Yeah, thousands, I would guess. I don't know. I'm not going to look it up. Well, no, because it was

Catelin: like, that was like, eight, you know, like BC. Oh yeah. Yeah. So it should have been thousands.

Catelin: 24 years.

Rich: Yeah.

Catelin: In the year of our Lord 2024. Right.

Rich: Okay. And did we explain what a balloon glass is to people?

Catelin: There's a wine glass. I don't know. Yeah. It's just a fat

Rich: wine glass or like a It's like a white wine. The important thing here is even though you're using Prosecco, no, not a champagne flute. That's not what this goes in.

Rich: This is a much like more chuggable kind of drink. It's a

Catelin: hearty, yeah, hearty beverage.

Rich: I don't know. Chuggable? That might not be a good way to go with that.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: I

Catelin: mean,

Rich: sorry, I just clicked something and all my stuff went away and I don't know where it went.

Catelin: Where did it go? Oh, there it is.

Rich: There it is.

Rich: Okay. I'm good. I'm back. I'm back. The user interface errors.

Catelin: Um,

Rich: okay. So I mean, I don't have any other tangents. I think we can probably take a break and roll into these pitfalls. So we make sure we get through it. Let's get

Catelin: into the pit.

Rich: I know.

Catelin: Early. Who are we?

Rich: I don't know.

Catelin: That's Thackeray. Thackeray Beings.

Rich: Where did that come from?

Catelin: That's from, uh, Is it a kids show? No, it's, oh god.

Rich: We're just starting this off, like, randomly. Is it Hocus

Catelin: Pocus? No.

Rich: It could be, I don't know. It's kind of like Help

Catelin: me, you know what I'm talking about, don't you? Thackery, Thackery Binx. It's where the, like, the guy turns, he's like a young man and then he turns into a cat.

Catelin: Oh, that sounds like hocus

Rich: pocus. It's hocus pocus. Yeah. Um, so for those just joining us, we just pulled a, uh, current season of love is blind where they just dump you into conversations people are having with zero context. So that was annoying, but we do have context for where we're going. Right. Caitlin.

Catelin: Yeah, we do. Marketing

Rich: pitfalls. Marketing pitfalls. There's four of them we're going to talk about. I don't

Catelin: know why I didn't believe that it was Hocus Pocus. Dorothy tried to tell me that she wanted to watch Hocus Pocus the other day and I was like, I don't think we're ready for that yet. I think it's too soon.

Rich: The scary part of it or? Just

Catelin: like in general. I don't know. Like, because the witches want to eat children. Like their whole goal is to eat bait, like eat kids. And so I was like,

Rich: the whole story of Hansel and Gretel. I mean, that we all heard his kids. Have you read that one too? Or

Catelin: Hansel and Gretel? No. Uh, but we did perform that.

Catelin: See, Zach, we didn't do any tangents in the beginning. Cause I have so many now. Yeah. We performed, I stage managed Hansel and Gretel in college, the production of, and so it's very important to me that you pronounce Hansel in the traditional, in the traditional German way. Hansel. Just swallow

Rich: that all.

Catelin: It's

Rich: like, it's

Catelin: very Midwestern to be like Hansel and Gretel, Hansel, Hansel.

Rich: Madrid, Iowa, Beatrice, Nebraska. Those are real places people, by the way. Um, Nevada. We've talked about this before. Come on. Okay, so should we jump into these pitfalls? Pun intended! Let's get into it. Because intend your puns, people.

Catelin: Let's get into the pit, yes. Which makes me think of Andy Dwyer singing, I fell in the pit, from Parks and Recreation.

Catelin: Okay. Zach, can you include a Parks and Rec gif somewhere in the show notes?

Rich: No, well, we maybe the gift we can. I was like, I thought you wanted the music in here. And I'm like, I don't think we can sample audio from a TV show in here. I mean, is it editorial? I

Catelin: don't think are we

Rich: news? We're news, right? We're news.

Rich: Sure. Why not? Um, okay. So first pitfall while Caitlin hydrates, um, lack of clear goals and objectives. Um, so this is one of my, um, pet peeves. Cause I want to know the why and the, why do I care? And the, so what? And that all comes from goals and objectives, right? Like if you don't have those, you can't get that far.

Rich: Um, yeah. I

Catelin: struggle with this one because, uh, I'm like, what? We're just like, let's just react, right? Like, let's just see what happens. Let's put it out there and like, see what happens. And then like, let the universe tell us. And this is like, broadly speaking in my life, as opposed to specifically in, in, uh, marketing, five year plan.

Rich: your middle ages medicine. Let's throw these leeches on them and see what happens.

Catelin: Let's

Rich: inject mercury into their body and see what happens. Um, no, we don't do that. We try to have a hypothesis. Um, and again, like sometimes goal setting can be really hard, right? So the easiest way to avoid this is to, um, Use benchmarks.

Rich: So if you don't have your own data yet, especially if you're just starting out in digital marketing, or you've completely changed your business model or something like that. Um, one, you probably do have data to get us somewhere. There's something in there. People visiting your website, filling out forms, visiting and buying or that kind of thing.

Rich: Um, But you can, you can always look up benchmarks and it's just as easy as Googling it and being like average conversion rate from landing page for whatever my industry is and you'll get something, you'll get a bunch of stuff you have to pay for those are out there and that's great, but you'll also get a bunch of free stuff.

Catelin: one of the things that I have recently been very. Into is HubSpot includes in their email marketing, they include benchmarks overall, and then they choose your industry, some industries that are supported to give you an idea of what your industry benchmarks are. So you, like, like you said, you can just either look that up or if you're using a tool like HubSpot, some of that is built in because they want you to be successful.

Rich: They also have additional resources. So that's just built into your email analytics, which is great. You just go in there and choose, it'll ask you to choose your industry. Um, and when you do, you'll get like that separate analytics, which is more relevant, right? Like I don't care about how everybody in the world opens emails.

Rich: I want to see my industry. Um, and e commerce is different than B2B. Uh, different professional services are different. Yep. Um, so the other thing that they have though, somewhere in their vast resource libraries, they have benchmarks for like click through rates for specific industries, because they have so much data, they can pull that together and aggregate it pretty easily internally.

Rich: Um, I've used those a million times because they, they generally have like All HubSpot user users, like here's what every account we have, however many thousands of those there are. Um, and then here's for your industry. And they'll, they'll let you know, it's not everybody. Not everything is in there. Um, the bigger B2B stuff, you're going to find more accurate data, the smaller stuff you won't.

Rich: But then again, if you use like a Shopify for e commerce, they've got the same data. They have. Like such a behemoth, they've got, you know, Shopify click through rates and recommendations. So you can get to goals. Don't let anybody say, well, we don't know what the goals are because we haven't done anything yet.

Rich: No, you can set goals and you can have a benchmark. Now you might be completely off. You might, you might perform completely differently, worse or better than those benchmarks, but at least you're aiming at something and trying to optimize to something. Um, and then once you have your own benchmarks, like just try to beat them.

Rich: It's that easy.

Catelin: Yeah. Yeah.

Rich: Beat your goals. Yes. All right. Um. All right. Oof. I feel exhausted after that one. I don't know why.

Catelin: I'm so tired. Well, I think it's just like, you know.

Rich: It's gloomy weather today for those who don't go through the Midwest change of seasons every ten minutes. Mm hmm. Um, it was 79 degrees at 3 o'clock in the morning and now it's in the 50s and raining and it's overcast and dark and gross.

Rich: Um. It's pretty,

Catelin: yeah. It's pretty bad.

Rich: But we need some good base moisture for the winter. Let the roots all just absorb it. It'll be great.

Catelin: Yeah. Uh, unfocused efforts. Which is really Part of our problem today is part of a previous, uh, previous point. Uh, not optimizing for mobile devices. This actually drives me batty.

Rich: It blows my mind. I

Catelin: had a full conversation with a client yesterday where they were insistent upon doing something that was not best practice for responsiveness, for readability, especially on mobile. And. I said, you can do that. We will not do it for you because it is not. A good idea, like period. And you'll just get complaints

Rich: or people will leave.

Rich: Yeah. It's, um, you're going to lose so many opportunities. Like just looking at your Google analytics back to number one goals and objectives. You, if you've got Google analytics on your website, you're seeing that when you look at how many people are coming in for a mobile, like. It's a lot. Even when you get into things like, oh, insurance, I'm sure they're looking from their desktop computer.

Rich: No, they're on their phone, right? Like, last time I changed our car insurance, it was while we were sitting at the dealer getting the car. Right. And I typed in the VIN and deleted the old car and put the new car in as soon as we'd signed everything and it was done.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: Um, all on my phone. Yeah. All either in app or on web, depending on, on what you're using.

Rich: Um, so you're just going to miss out on a lot of potential customers. If you have a crappy web experience. Well,

Catelin: and in that case, like you're going to piss off your current customers, right? I think that's

Rich: the second one. Yeah.

Catelin: Yeah. Poor

Rich: user experience.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: Um,

Catelin: nothing will make me. Change my mind faster about a purchase if I cannot be served in a meaningful and efficient way online.

Rich: Yep. I mean, the other one is like, oh, we have an app, so we just force people into the app if they're on mobile. No, no, I have the option to see your site on mobile.

Catelin: No, no, no, no. I love that we can be. I will not, I'm not downloading another thing. I'm not doing it.

Rich: We're cranky old people on this. Um, yeah, I went to one of those.

Rich: I'm middle

Catelin: aged. I refuse to learn anything new.

Rich: Yeah, I went to one of those discount retailers. I saw an ad on Facebook or whatever. And it's one that everybody knows and people have bought for and like people have endorsed. Um, and I went to like click on this sweater. Cause I'm like, Oh, that's cute. And it's really cheap.

Rich: And I'm into sweaters right now because it's fall. Um, yeah. And all I got was download the app, download the app, download the app. This is an in app exclusive. You can only see this item in the app. And I was just like, Oh, come on.

Catelin: Lost my purchase. Goodbye. Like

Rich: bite me. So the other thing is you're going to be harder to find.

Rich: So not only will you miss audience and as Caitlin so eloquently said, piss off your existing customers. Search engines prioritize mobile options. Who will then

Catelin: tell you to piss off, right? Mm hmm.

Rich: So, um, it's going to negatively impact your SEO and you're not going to show up as much or as often. Um, one thing that's interesting that I noticed, Caitlin, I was looking at our SEO stuff the other day and our, because you can, you can look at it by mobile and by desktop or laptop, whatever, non mobile browser.

Rich: The results are almost the same. Like we're almost getting the exact same rankings on both to the point. Like it's so tight. So then I started like spot checking other clients and most of them are, but not everybody.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: Um, but I think if you've got an even mix, you're pro or maybe it's just where sites optimize.

Rich: I don't know.

Catelin: Um,

Rich: but I was almost looking at it and going like, cause we pay for like keywords that we monitor. Right. And if we, we've got mobile and desktop in separate. Things we pay twice and so I'm like we could probably just get rid of one and just go with the mobile one or go With the desktop one.

Rich: They're the same thing and I wonder if we'll get there I wonder if that'll happen, but even if it does mobile will win like desktop is not winning anytime

Catelin: soon It's

Rich: In spite of the, um, and I just read about this the other day again. And I was like, yep, the millennial thing that is like, I must make big purchases from a big screen.

Catelin: Yeah. It's little internet and big internet.

Rich: Yeah. Like

Catelin: my, my best friend and I were having this conversation where she's like, I need to be at a computer to do that. And I was like, Oh, you need the big internet. She's like, yes. Yeah, I can or intern

Rich: intern Casey was like that when he was working on 71 shirts.

Rich: He's like, yeah I'm like, hey, so have you looked at it on your phone? He's like, I don't shop on my phone and I'm like, oh and he's not even millennial like he's gotta be. Oh, he's

Catelin: a baby

Rich: It's not a baby. He's a grown human being.

Catelin: Well, he is but he's not even 21.

Rich: I he might be now I think now I I think he turned, I wonder if it's his birthday almost, I can go look.

Rich: Anyway, um, yeah, he was like, no, he's like, he's like, and so many of his friends, he's like, yeah, we won't shop on our phones. We only shop on a big screen. And I'm like, Oh, I'm like, like an iPad. He's like, I want a laptop. An iPad's not big enough. I'm like, they're actually, you can get a 13 inch iPad and a 13 inch laptop.

Rich: So they're the same size, but okay, I get you. I get you. I

Catelin: love it. I love it.

Rich: I know. I was like, I have never felt so seen as the old man energy in the room as when you get like a Gen Z er who just bursts forth with their like, get off my lawn on something from the inside. It's my favorite. I like,

Catelin: I like Gen Z.

Catelin: Megan sounded off, uh, to somebody in an email and I was like, good for you. And then I told her that it made me deeply uncomfortable because I could never, I was so proud of her and impressed. I was like, yeah, you got some, she's getting after it. And then I was like, I. I'm squirming on the inside because I could never, if I received the email that she sent, I would have died.

Catelin: And then also the idea of sending that email to a stranger. I was like, I couldn't do it. Oh, interesting. And I was, I was like, I want to learn from this moment.

Rich: Now I feel like I need to know more. So maybe we'll follow up on this after.

Catelin: Yeah. Yeah.

Rich: Um, so I think dovetailing off of that lower search engine rankings on not being optimized for mobile is just ignoring SEO altogether.

Rich: Um, and I have, we had a. Someone who came to us to fix their website. It was a small website. It was like five pages. It wasn't a very big project. And I kept talking about SEO. I don't care about SEO. Okay. But we need to like, SEO doesn't matter to us. Nobody finds us that way. And I'm like, I was like, okay.

Rich: And so I basically told him, I'm like, we will fix what's wrong with your website. It was a HubSpot CMS. It's somebody who knew nothing about what they were doing. Did, um, this custom build for five pages. I'm like, you could use a free theme. Like this is not hard. Um, but I'm like, but we can do that.

Rich: Continue working with you afterwards. And he was mad. And I was like, but you don't want to do what we do. Like,

Catelin: you

Rich: know, I'm not here to just add a page to your website because you want to. Like, it's crazy. It

Catelin: should be driven by your. Data and analytics and a KPI from the first point. Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, in SEO, people who are like, Oh, it's not important.

Rich: I want to point them to, and I can't cause it's specific client data and it's protected and we're not allowed to share results for certain clients, but we have clients that are doing a lot of great business just from organic search. Um, they have. Like a really good growing, very fast growing portion of their business coming from organic search.

Rich: And yeah, they're paying us to do that. So it does cost money. Um, but people are finding them in that authentic way because everything is set up to make them findable.

Catelin: Yeah. To be successful. Yes.

Rich: Yeah. And you don't have to know anything about SEO. One, I would tell you, you can take a course. Coursera has a great course.

Rich: It's like 240 bucks. If you can do the whole thing in seven days, you do get a seven day trial and you can hammer through it, which I've seen people do for free.

Catelin: That makes my head hurt.

Rich: But, um, you know, I took a, uh, a 26 week course from them. It was multiple, it was a certification with multiple courses.

Rich: It was, it was a college course from, uh, UC Santa Barbara. Um, and it was amazing what I learned about SEO. This was years ago, of course, but, um, I should take it again, see if I still know everything. Um, so. SEO is going to drive traffic to your site without paying for paid advertising. Um, and if you've got a marketing person who can learn SEO and do it, or even, even if you're working with us, you know, there's fees we have to help you manage or to manage your paid advertising as well as the cost of the advertising.

Rich: SEO takes out that third party cost of the advertising and it's just us managing it for you and with you. Um, and that's number one.

Catelin: But can be. Effective, if you're doing it correctly.

Rich: But if you don't start now, you're never going to get there. That's the thing with SEO. The more you keep putting it off, the longer it's going to take.

Rich: Even if it takes a year, a year from today is shorter than a year from next month or sooner. Um, also, um, especially if you're in a niche industry, um, You'll have difficulty competing or the flip you can like outrun your competition. If none of them are doing anything with SEO and you're the only one doing it, you're the only

Catelin: one doing underwater basket weaving and targeting specific keywords and states with underwater weavers, then you're going to really outshine your competition.

Catelin: That's you. Well, it's that easy. So you can't have a leg up probably like pretty easy to spin up a paid campaign around that too Knowing that those keywords are maybe not super popular. They might be inexpensive

Rich: Yeah And the keyword research that you do for both can dovetail they can work for each other and they dovetail back and forth And if you're doing paid It helps your SEO.

Rich: So more people will click on an organic result. If they see an ad for the same company at the top of the page. Um, what's nice about that is you don't pay for the click on the organic. You pay for the click on the ad. So if they see the ad, but I know that's going to take me to a landing page. I know that's going to take me to a place.

Rich: That's going to make me like force me into an experience and I'm going to back out of it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'll just click on your organic result that won't do that. And it'll take me to a place on your website where I can browse more freely, maybe with less tracking. Uh, Yes. But that's, it's human behavior.

Rich: It's definitely, um, the way we work.

Catelin: The way we work.

Rich: So, speaking of tracking, you need to track your leads and analytics and do it the right way.

Catelin: Yes. What's the right way?

Rich: Oh, that's a really great question. Well, one, it goes back to our first one, right? You've got to track toward your goals and metrics that impact your business.

Rich: Um, and I know we've talked about vanity metrics before. Clicks are great. Clicks get you to form fills, or Add to cart or whatever your next phase is. So you need to understand all of the pieces of your funnel. Um, and you need to track the metrics that matter to all of those pieces. Um, so that you can, I mean, quite literally, you want to understand how somebody found your website, add SEO, social media, whatever it is.

Rich: referral, they just typed it into a browser, whatever. And then the path they took and what got them all the way to the end, because ultimately you want to put your stuff in front of people who are converting. And so if you know where your stuff is and which stuff is actually converting, I mean, honestly, the middle of the funnel matters a little bit less, but it still matters because you can optimize each piece of that.

Rich: Um, so. You can't make decisions about what to change. So one of the, a good example of this is, you know, we've been talking a lot about our own marketing and we have great landing pages. We have so many wonderful landing pages and we share them in social and stuff like that, but we haven't really run our own paid campaigns, so not enough people are going to them.

Rich: And, you know, someone will be like, Hey, I really want to optimize this landing page, or I really want to optimize this email drip campaign that comes after somebody fills out a form. And I'm like, you can. Guess you can use best practices, which you should use, but I'm like, you can't actually optimize it until enough traffic is coming in that you can see what's happening.

Rich: So I'm like, let's get the ad campaign going, drive a thousand people to this landing page. And if zero of them download the offer, We've got a landing page problem, or we've got a mismatch between the ad and the landing page somewhere in there. But if we determine the ad is great and the audience is great, and this is what they're looking for, but they're not downloading, then we've got a landing page problem.

Rich: We can optimize that next. We have to get people to fill out the landing page so we can optimize how many people like fill out the form or download. Move on. And it's just so logical, right? But so many people just miss it. Um, and I think that's one of the big questions that we have is like, and one of the pitfalls people run into is like, I'm getting, I'm getting a ton of traffic to my site, huge ton of traffic to my site, but my sales are terrible.

Rich: Okay. We can work with that. I'll work with that any day, all day. Um, we actually took a client and reduced the traffic to their website, but increased their sales. It was crap

Catelin: traffic.

Rich: Yep. See, but you got to start there and they're like, no, I want more form fills and I'm like, we need to go back and analyze your traffic

Catelin: and

Rich: then where it's coming from.

Rich: And we just tightened everything up and it was really, really wonderful for about five years. So I just did. Went gangbusters. Yeah. Um, so yeah. Um, you're also going to waste money. A lot of these you'll waste money. Boo. I mean, you don't waste money ignoring SEO. You just miss a lot of opportunities. Right.

Rich: Um, but everybody, like the old saying, this kills me from years ago. So date me, but, um, I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just don't know which half. Um, because you could sort of measure TV, sort of measure radio, you couldn't measure outdoor, you kind of could get newspaper, um, and so people would do couponing was a way to like, Oh, if the coupons come in, that's measurable, right?

Rich: So that's our first kind of direct mail was one of those, like, if this person comes in, I know I mailed them a thing. Um, Today, if you're wasting half of your marketing budget, you can know

Catelin: exactly where it is too.

Rich: Yep.

Catelin: Hopefully.

Rich: 100%. Yeah. Um, and that's part of why I like systems like HubSpot. Um, as we look at their dashboard, if you connect everything and you use those things, um, and you, you use their dashboards and you set up their dashboards and you check them regularly, you'll know what you're wasting and what you're not wasting.

Rich: Um, and I think that's a big thing with all of these, right? Like Knowledge is power. Even if that knowledge is like, oh, this thing is a train wreck. Well, if you know, you have a train wreck. Now, you know, you have to clean up and get

Catelin: back on track. Yeah.

Rich: Right. Yeah. And maybe go get a new train or something. I don't know.

Rich: I don't know how that works.

Catelin: A little, a little engine,

Rich: a new engine. I love it. That's fantastic.

Catelin: Yeah. Thank you so much. All right, so those

Rich: are four pitfalls and Zach will make sure all that stuff is in the notes We always post transcripts, of course Still have no calls. So no one's getting a free cocktail book Well,

Catelin: that is a missed opportunity.

Catelin: I know I've ever seen one

Rich: It is, we got the print proofs and there were some random weird letters missing. Very odd. Very odd. Uh, it wasn't, it was, um, Firt. The S was missing. Was that what it was? Yeah. Yeah. Um, on first. So, uh, we're working through that and we're getting it off to the printer probably next week.

Rich: Um, so we will have those, uh, and I would love, I would love to send out 10 of those, like before the end of the year, but we'd need 10 phone calls. Um, So, yeah, I think, I think that's an episode.

Catelin: I think so. You can always find our agency at antidote underscore seven one. And if you have a question. Or a comment, and you'd like a free cocktail book, you can head to ctapodcast.

Catelin: live to send us an email or leave us a voice message at 402 718 9971. You don't have to speak to a human, you can just call and say whatever you want into that little, that little message box.

Rich: No human will ever answer that. If a human answers that, then you need to send us an email because no one should actually be able to access that line.

Rich: It doesn't ring to any phone. It literally just goes to a voicemail box. Um, so yeah. And I think, you know,

Catelin: a human voice or,

Rich: or you have a problem and maybe you need some different meds. Um, You know, sometimes I, I consider different, uh,

Catelin: I think that's a tangent for an offline conversation. It

Rich: is, but before we go, I have to mention, um, our next episode is going to be, uh, speaking of psychology, look at that, look at that transition, Caitlin, look at that transition.

Rich: Uh, the psychology behind marketing, uh, and our drink is not going to be your basic. classic drink. It's called a peanut butter cup, which I am intrigued by, um, unless it includes peanut butter vodka or not peanut butter vodka, the peanut butter whiskey. I am not down for that,

Catelin: but

Rich: peanut butter cup sounds fantastic.

Rich: So tune in next week and you'll learn what that is. Uh, but till then, Caitlin, I think that's an episode.

Catelin: That's an episode.