#2 - The Biggest Marketing Misconceptions

Think you just need a website and customers will magically show up? Believe that SEO is a one-and-done task? You’re not alone—but these are just some of the biggest misconceptions businesses have about online marketing.

In this episode of Over The Bull, we’re cutting through the nonsense and breaking down the most common marketing myths that are costing businesses time, money, and leads. From social media and Google Ads to SEO and content strategy, we’ll unpack why these misunderstandings exist and what to do instead.

If you’re tired of wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work, this one’s for you.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Introduction: 0:00

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

Ken: 0:10

The biggest marketing misconceptions on this episode of Over the Bull. Welcome back. In the first episode, we talked to you about us letting go of a client. That's kind of a shocker because most people don't want to talk about these things. Agencies want you to think that they're spotless and everything goes great. Everybody gets a five-star experience and everybody grows. In reality, that simply doesn't happen. You go back and listen to the first episode, you're going to be able to kind of see some of the tactics used to steal your time and your resources and things you can do to be more successful on the internet. Now, with that being said, let's jump right in to common marketing misconceptions and why they're wrong. Now, before we talk about the actual conceptions, let's talk about Where do they begin? They usually begin from two places. Well, maybe three, but we'll try to cover all those. Number one are designers that are largely ignorant of marketing. Now, there is something in business called the law of the lid. The law of the lid basically means that you only know what you know, and when you get to a certain point, you cease to be valuable in giving knowledge in that particular area. Now, we all have our laws of the lid. I've got mine. You've got yours. Everyone's got theirs. Now, the question is, is where is their lid in marketing? And so someone trying to sell web design but doesn't know a lot about search engine optimization, paid advertising, or really good squeeze pages, guess what? They're going to give you a template. They're going to give you generic content. They're going to give you things that are not capable of being successful for your business. They won't contribute. The other is lies by omission. Yes, it's true. A lot of people do know what the reality of the Internet is, but they also know it's a stumbling block to get you to sign up with them. And so if they share the reality, it's not as fun as the fantasy. And if you come in with a fantastical idea of what the Internet's supposed to do, and you just got through a bad experience, then they may minimize that as well. Now, you go through that a few times, you spend a lot of money. And so you want to make sure that you're getting this clear idea. And then the last one, the one I just thought of literally, as I said, too, in the very beginning here, and that is the mythology of the Internet. All throughout history, people have followed mythologies and the mythology of the Internet is compelling. I mean, let's face it, we all have ideas of what the Internet should do. And we're all told about these great stories of what the Internet does for other people. And so it's natural for us to think that that mythology is true. However, the people that make the mythologies up have a vested interest in pushing those mythologies because they want you to also believe them so that you spend more money in those mythologies. Now, this could be designers. This could be marketing people. This could be the companies that actually sell paid advertising. The whole thing could be the emperor has no clothes in a lot of cases. So are you alone? Are you the guy that has bad luck? Are you the guy that is missing out on the internet? Odds are, probably you're not the only guy in your boat. Matter of fact, I would argue most businesses are in your boat. because they're falling prey to one or more of these three ideas that can kill a business. Now, with that being said, let's jump right into the actual misconceptions, the actual mythology of what's going on with the Internet. So, number one is, if I build it, they will come. I can't believe this still exists on the Internet, and I can't believe that there are some companies who are absolutely blowing up under this myth. I mean, some of them advertise on the Super Bowl, for goodness sakes. So what am I talking about? The idea is if you build a website, then people are going to magically find you. This means that, you know, you're going to have someone put together a website. You're going to post it on the Internet or publish it on the Internet. And once it's published on the Internet, then people are just going to start Googling and finding you just haphazardly. Now, this is absolutely not true. When you think of the internet, you think of like this noisy marketplace where people are yelling and screaming and trying to sell their goods and services. And then imagine that you don't have a voice or arms or legs and you're stuck in a corner. That's a little more like what it's like if you don't have marketing. So when you think of a website, do not think that a website by itself is going to do what you want it to do. Now, let me go a little deeper with this. These do-it-yourself website builders, when you talk from agency to agency, inside, we kind of, you know, we know the real deal. And so we kind of laugh at these ideas. Now, I know that's kind of hard, but it's true. Now, why is that? Because the first step in building any website is planning. a lot of planning. It's looking at your business, your competitor's business. It's looking at different styles, your demographic, your audience, and then building a website based upon that criteria. It's never choose a pretty template. It's never use let AI content generate your pages. It's never use stock photography across the board on your website. Those things don't work. Matter of fact, if you start out that way and then you start working with a marketing company, odds are they're going to dismantle it and have to completely rebuild it again because your designer didn't have the marketing experience they need. If you're doing it yourself, unless you're a marketing expert, you're definitely not going to cover all the bases. That's the hard reality. Guys like me, we've spent the years we have because we know that there's a lot of things that go into websites. For example... Here's a freebie. The top of your page should always be in motion. The middle of your page should be more logic. And the bottom of your page should be more reinforcement. That's just kind of a standard thing most professionals know today. The other thing is site architecture and how you build it, the focus of each page, what you name each page, the URL of each page. All of that stuff goes into it. So this leads you to, well, but can't professionals use do-it-yourself website builders? That's like saying, would Michelangelo use an eight-pack box of crayons if he's got his preferred medium? Well, of course he would. So it's the same thing. So anybody that's claiming to be a professional but is jumping into do-it-yourself builders, you should think twice about that. Again, this is over the bull. This is the hard stuff, right? This is the reality. And this is why most businesses fail. You know, they have this idea that they build a website and it's just going to work. Or they throw together a bunch of pages and it's just going to magically do what they want it to do. It does not happen like that. So what's number two? SEO is a one-time thing. Now, what's interesting about this is the question itself is kind of weird. But the myth is... We optimized the site last year. We're good, right? Or we optimized it one time. Absolutely not. Now here's the really strange part of this. When you build a website, before you actually build the pages out, before you actually work on the structure, you do a lot of SEO work before you do it. Even if you're not going to do a full-fledged SEO effort, you really want to make sure that everything is in its proper place. And so, most people that fail, they'll have a website built with a bunch of pages, and those pages are completely structured in the wrong way. Google would have a hard time understanding it, as would your customers, and then it has to be rebuilt. Then if you trust your SEO guy to build it and he doesn't know design, then you're going to miss out on all the design stuff. So there is this kind of Reese cup, peanut butter, chocolate thing. So the idea is SEO, there are parts that are a one-time thing, which are the initial setup, but it's constantly recurring, evolving, and changing. So here's an idea. One thing that we do is content monitoring and updates. Meaning that there may be an article that was posted that was ranking really well on Google and driving traffic. But we look at the quality score and it goes down over a period of time because the competition changes and therefore what you need to do on that particular page needs to change too. So what we do is we regularly audit critical pages and then we monitor where their position is on the web and then we make changes to those positioning and that's constant. It's not a one-time thing. It's not a write a blog article and it's magically going to bring you people forever and ever. There are tools we have where we can actually see when competition edits their content to what degree they edit their content. It's a fight. I mean, clawing and scratching to get your way to the top and then constantly maintaining it to stay at the top. Now, part of this could be, well, what about title tags? What about the meta stuff? You know, you probably heard these words that sound kind of scary, you know, title tags and meta descriptions. Well, if you really think about it, a title tag is simply like the title of a book and a meta description is simply the synopsis of the book. Every web page you have has got a different title and a different synopsis. If they're too close, it could cause Google to get confused. And so the idea is maybe that synopsis needs to change too. Maybe that title of the book isn't as good as it used to be. And so those things can change too. SEO is a long game and it's an ever-changing game. Even if you did everything perfect and even if your competition didn't change, other people didn't post content to compete, just in the arena of content marketing alone, Google's algorithms change because they're out looking for the bad guys. By the way, here's a quick side note. I did publish a press release earlier this year about what we call PBNs, private blog networks. Private blog networks could be detrimental to your business, and a lot of SEO firms use these things. So if you go to integrisdesign.com, go to the About section, you can find our press release. I'll try to put in the footnotes here too, and you can actually read what a PBN is. It's beyond the scope of this meeting, but you want to be careful because, again, people who are service providers try to cut corners as much as they can when they can because the more time they spend on something, the less profitable your project is. That's a very key point in every single thing we're talking about today. Now, let's move on. Social media is free marketing. Now, the myth is that if you just post on Facebook or Instagram, the sales are going to magically pop up. Maybe if you get those followers on your page, you're going to reach those people and you're going to be able to get that free marketing push. So I just did a Google search just to find out what AI is telling me. I wanted to just see what the current numbers were. And so what I'm looking at is somewhere between 2% and 6.5% of people that like your business page are going to actually see your post. So what does that mean? You got 100 people, two to roughly seven people are going to see it. Now it's according to the internet I'm looking at right now. So the idea that if you gain a lot of followers and then you're going to gain a lot of sales through those followers, it's relative, right? I mean, what are you really going to sell by doing absolutely nothing? So this moves into the idea of posting, boosting posts, also running advertisement within Meta, which is, you know, obviously Facebook and Instagram and a few other guys. And there are certain strategies that work really good. Now, the problem is that social media marketing, when you do advertising and you do it through Google, there are certain things that you do because some of the data shows that over, I think it's around 60% of the success of an ad comes down to the creativity of it. And a lot of it comes down to video marketing, believe it or not, creating video ads. And so, um, if you want a little side homework, you can look up the, uh, the ABCDs of video marketing with, uh, Google. It's really interesting. It stands for, uh, attention, branding, connection, and direction. Um, Meta also gives you some clues in their 2023, um, manual on how to do creative, which was pretty good. I used to minimize how effective I thought their suggestions were historically, but the 2023 guide gives some really good information about when the brand should pop up and things. So we have this combination we use using both recommendations. And through trial and error, we found out what really kind of works. But here's the weird thing. Let me throw this out at you. We're working with a trailer manufacturer. And with that trailer manufacturer, one thing we've run into was meta ads. And we did these really polished looking ads. And they weren't performing that well. So we met with the client and we talked about what they've done historically. And what they did was they actually did these kind of, not clumsy, but kind of rudimentary looking ads that look like classified ads. And what we found within their demographic was that people are looking for the best deals. And so polished ads appeared to be cuing them into thinking that their product was more expensive. And so what we're doing is we're running continual experiments because it's still young in its project age. But we're running these ads to find out maybe if the kind of rough-looking ads outperform the really clean-looking ads. Now, here's the weird thing about it. In marketing, we shouldn't care because the idea is to bring people to the website and to make a purchase. You're not pay. You're not get extra points because of your posturing or how you do things in terms of like marketing. You know, the aesthetics being a certain standard or whatever. If poor aesthetics drive people, if rough cut videos work better, then you should do the rough cut videos. And there's a whole segment that does this stuff. So social media marketing is not only is it not free, but it's incredibly complicated. And it requires a lot of trial and error in order to get that kind of marketing really honed in and working. So here's the next one. More traffic equals more sales. Absolutely not true. It's never true. Now, if we insert a word in the middle of that, it can be true. And that is more qualified traffic equals more sales. Now, in SEO, paid advertising, social media marketing, you name it. A lot of the game is they show you the impressions. You look at the number of clicks. You look at these other things. But it doesn't equal more sales. And that's because it's unfocused traffic. I would rather have a keyword phrase that is incredibly targeted, that is right where we need them in order for them to make a purchase. I'm going to qualify that in a second. Then I went for something really ambiguous and loose. So the analogy that I would give a potential business is, let's say we're running a keyword report and they're selling shoes. Now, the top keyword is probably going to be shoes. But if you can imagine someone Googles shoes and they're looking for high-top basketball shoes. And they run into shoes. They're going to see everything from women's shoes, men's shoes, different styles of shoes, colors of shoes, whatever may have you. So then what they'll do is they'll refine their search. The refined search may be best shoes for basketball. And then they're going to see a bunch of different brands and reviews and ratings. Then they're going to dig a little deeper. And ultimately, they're going to be at what we would call the bottom of the funnel, which is brand X reviews. basketball shoes, whatever, you know, near me or something like that. Or maybe they're going to go to some of the popular buying platforms like Amazon to look for those shoes. And so the idea is we want to make sure that we're at the right place and time and give the right value proposition and make sure that we can at least give a compelling argument. And even if we do everything right, only a certain percentage are going to buy from us. So what I meant by more traffic, more sales, and then I said, well, rather highly targeted, and I said, let me qualify that. So this is what I mean by that. In marketing, there are two main systems that we typically refer to. One is the sales funnel. Now, the sales funnel goes through the process of someone who typically goes from understanding they need something to making the purchase to a follow-up. The ecosystem, which is the other model, says that people jump in and out of the, you know, depending upon the model you look at on the sales funnel, you know, how they transition from understanding they need something to making the purchase. They may jump up and down several steps rather than making a logical gradation to making a purchase. Now what that means is those keywords also have to be targeted. but they could be higher funnel keyword targeting. But then again, if you're targeting someone, like for example, one of the steps is researching options. You know, you find out you got a problem and then you start to research the different ways you can resolve the problem or the thing you need. Now, if someone's in the researching phase, the type of content you would want to post at that researching phase would be different than someone willing to make a purchase. Because if they're willing to make a purchase, but you're addressing them from a higher sales funnel standpoint, you may push them back up the sales funnel and cost yourself a sale. So you see it gets a little bit complicated, but regardless, all the funneling from top to bottom and where they're at in that sales funnel process should be qualified and should be targeted. So I want to make sure to let you know that you just don't want to target the bottom of the funnel. Those are typically more expensive. They typically convert at a higher rate. But the higher funnel stuff may convert at a lower rate, but it's also going to be cheaper. And so if it's cheaper, you may find out that it converts at a lower rate, but it's still more cost effective when you average out the cost per sale. So just stuff to think about. Oh, the next one is very good, in my opinion. It's Google Ads equals instant success. Now, the myth is... you're going to run ads and be profitable immediately. Not the case. It's absolutely not, especially today, it's not the case. Because now you have things like Google's artificial intelligence, looking at how people use the internet, things like that, where they're at in the buying cycle, which ones convert better based upon where that person's at in their buying cycle and what they're doing. And there's tons and tons of factors that go into it. So now it does happen. I'm not going to lie to you. Sometimes, if it's a very simple model, you may see success early out. Now, when I say simple, simple is relative. And so I've seen very simple offerings that have a lot of competition also require a lot of work. Because it goes far and beyond just running ads, putting a bunch of text up, and publishing them on the internet and showing up on Google. Remember, that's just the first step. They also are going to look at your price value, should they use you. And the old adage is where if you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else, they're going to default to price. And there's always going to be somebody willing to charge a little bit less and go out of business a little bit quicker if you leave it to that. And so the idea is Google Ads, you're looking somewhere typically between four or six weeks or maybe longer. which means you have to invest. And the more you invest in it, the quicker you can learn. And also the more different categories in which you advertise in, those will also require different budgets. And so you want to be careful about someone that tells you they're going to turn on ads and then you're going to see this magic. Or if you bought into the mythology that once you run ads, it's going to magically happen. Not the case. You need an expert that's going to go do it. And here's a little side note. When it comes to Google Ads, you can actually set them up yourself. But it's kind of like doing the do-it-yourself website builder. It's not going to work well. When I've gone through different Google Ads training and learning and everything, the degree at which you set up a campaign that's successful... and you learn from requires a lot of work and a lot of expertise. And so, yeah, you can do it yourself, but when you do, it's probably not going to work as good as if you have an expert doing it for you. That's just the way it is. That's why we work hard to get our Google Ads partnership. You've got to maintain a certain standard to keep that partnership with Google. And we do that because we believe that it shows that we do put the extra effort into our Google Ads effort. So here's the next one. Email marketing is dead. It doesn't work. Now the myth is that no one reads them. No one uses them. Now the reality is email marketing could be the most powerful tool for your business. Now Obviously, putting something on your website like sign up for our newsletter is not going to do the trick. Now, what you want to do is you want to make a compelling reason for someone to sign up and share their email address. Because in today's world, sharing an email is like sharing money. You don't want to do it that often and you're probably not going to give your best email address in some cases. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that what you're offering is something that somebody would want. Now, the other side is you want to make sure to build the right processes in email marketing. For example, the length of the emails, the call to action you put in your emails, the frequency of your emails, automations. You can automatically send out emails on a certain schedule. And the idea is that you do want to engage with people who are interested in your product. So there's another thing about email marketing that's really interesting. Remember earlier we were talking about the whole sales funnel thing. And we also talked about people won't necessarily choose your product even if you've done everything right. Because people are people. They can make bad choices. They can decide to do something completely different just because they happen to like something. Now, but here's kind of the thing. When they come to your website, if you can make that email offer something really compelling, then you do something that normally you wouldn't do. And that is capture a certain number of people's email addresses that would have normally left your website. Then what you could do is you could start marketing to them through your business and then maybe capture some of those people that weren't. Now, we ran this test recently again. Now, we run a lot of these, but this is just the most recent one, was we have a client that has a seasonal business. Now, in their seasonal business, it normally picks up, you know, in the spring. So we ran a very special offer, basically saying, are you getting ready for the spring? If so, share this, and when you're ready to make the purchase or ready to move forward, we'll We'll share this out. Now, I'm doing this very sloppy because I don't want to give away all the stuff we worked through with them. But then what happened was we started getting a lot of people signing up. And that's exactly what was happening. They were looking, but they weren't ready to make the purchase. And we captured a lot of email addresses of people who were in that preparation phase. Now, if they would have left the website... then a large portion of them are never going to remember they visited that website to begin with. But now we have the ability to reach out and make special offers and understand them a little bit better. So email marketing is not dead by any stretch of the imagination. Now let's piggyback a little bit on last week. This does not mean you go across the internet and you start looking for email addresses and start sending emails from like your... regular email address, or even through, you know, one of the email services that are out there, you know, like Constant Contact, Active Campaign, MailChimp. There's a bunch of other ones out there because those are not for cold email marketing. And that's what that's called. You do not want to use them for that. Basically, what you want to do is you want to market. You want to capture those email addresses legitimately, and then you want to engage with them. I mean, do you really want your business to be associated as the people that send out cold emails? More than likely, you don't. For me, like I told you last week, I block them. I don't care what the offer is. I don't care how much they promise. I don't care what they'll do. I block them because they did not respect my time. You don't want to be on the other end of that. And don't fall prey to it. And then plus, if you send out bulk emails from your email, you can actually get your email where it's blocked on some of the servers. So be careful about that. Oh, and now we're at one that hits home. This one hit home actually a couple weeks ago. And the idea is more quantity is better. You know, the idea is crank out a lot of blog posts. Now, what a lot of people are doing are using artificial intelligence to create these posts. Now, this is a horrible, absolutely horrible idea. The idea is quality trumps quantity. And we have tools that can help us understand effective, you know, popular blog articles. And then we can kind of glean what's good from all those using artificial intelligence and some other tools. We can build an outline. We can determine the length of the article and also how many times you should use certain words and how many times you should not use certain words. And to modify and create those articles takes a lot of time to do that kind of stuff. And so it requires special tools, special knowledge, things like that. Nothing crazy, but it's just something that an average business doesn't want to take time to learn. But the idea that if you're going to think you're going to just put up a bunch of AI content and publish it on a website is probably one of the worst ideas you could possibly do. We had a client who... wasn't sold on the idea that we should focus on creating really effective, optimized articles and felt it was more important to crank out a quantity of articles. Now, when we met, I looked at the articles and it was obvious that they were all generated by ChatGPT. Now, ChatGPT can be a really cool tool and we use it in a lot of places. Now, not in that case. So the articles are basically published or scheduled to be published on her website using them. And I can't quite talk her off the ledge. Like in her mind, it's just as though quantity is going to trump it. And if we're not doing enough in terms of quantity, then it's not effective. Now, this is absolutely untrue. Proper, well-sought out, well-searched articles can be very beneficial. Now I'm going to give you an example, not a promise, but just an example of how effective it can be. Using some of the tools we have, we're able to see what competitors are publishing on their website that's bringing them the most traffic. Then what we can do is take that article and then we can reconstruct it but make it a lot better than we've had it. Or they have it. Then once we published that article on the first index, no joke, first time Google saw that article, we were on the top page. Now, that's because we did a lot of work on the front end of this. We did not just simply say, hey, create me an article with this keyword phrase on it or create me this and then send that as though it's unique content. Now, the sad truth is that I have seen some service providers who are guaranteeing custom content, and they're giving unlimited revisions on that content, and then they publish it. Now, think of it in terms of a model. If you own that business, would you be able to give unlimited revisions to content unless you were using something like artificial intelligence? The answer is no. I mean, the next worst case scenarios are using somebody that's not familiar with your native language. And that's also going to be just as bad. Creating good content takes a while. I mean, you can spend an hour, two hours, maybe even longer properly weighting, fine tuning and humanizing content based on the best of outlines. And so do not buy into this. Do not do it. You want quality over quantity. And don't get fooled into this AI content stuff. There's too many people out there trying to peddle it because it's an easy bug. Now, I'm going to retouch on something because this is huge. And the idea that marketing should bring instant results. Absolutely, this is not true. Marketing is a continual effort. And some of it's a long game. Some of it's a midterm game. And sometimes you just step up to the plate and you knock it out of the ballpark and it just works. So this story goes back, gosh, probably three years. We had a new guy come in. He had a, you know, a starter budget. And when we first ran the campaign, he made an astronomical amount of sales off our first effort. And we spent a lot of time working with him, trying to talk him off the ledge of thinking that would always be his results. The reality is sometimes those early success stories can be hard because that sets a tone and that tone is unrealistic. The reality is, is you need a midterm and a long-term gain. And if you get some short-term successes, then great. That's just a little bit better. But you don't ever want to be the person who's in a position where you've got a very limited budget, a finite amount of time, and you're counting on that Hail Mary pass to somehow save your business. If you're looking for that and you're trying to find someone to be able to do that, keep in mind the odds are staggering against you. It really takes effort. time, energy, a lot of creativity, and a lot of massaging campaigns in order to get them effective. Search engine optimization strategies are definitely the long game. I mean, you should look at at least six months or more for those. Again, sometimes you may hit the algorithm just right and you may show up a little bit quicker than that, but we would never sell it under that pretense. And we also sell it under the terms of gaining visibility and not something ridiculous like being number one on Google for a certain keyword phrase. That kind of stuff is just sensationalism. Now, here's the other thing. Have you ever heard that your customers don't use something like LinkedIn or maybe Facebook or Instagram? Now, here's the thing. It's just like payments. Some people like to pay with credit cards, some cash, some checks, some Venmo, some PayPal, some whatever, some bank transactions, however they want to do it. It's kind of the same thing with the way you market on the Internet. I've heard a lot of people say that their people are not on Facebook no more. Probably more Instagram. But it's like this concept that there's a certain demographic in certain places where And while that is true to a certain extent, but to assume that their clients don't reside in those places is often a mistake. And so the idea is kind of twofold, because it's a challenge. Because the first challenge is you really want to be everywhere your clients are, and you want to be able to measure how successful each one of those platforms are. But the other side is, is If you're a small business, you're not going to be able to properly invest in all those efforts. And so what you want to be able to do is strategically choose where you want to be on the Internet. But really, that should come off a lot of professional guidance. And you should never just try to be everywhere all the time and definitely don't just think spinning up a business page on a certain profile like X or Facebook is going to do anything significant for your business, maybe even insignificant for your business. Matter of fact, if you don't take it seriously, people who live on those platforms or spend a lot of time on them, they won't see that you're serious about it and they may not even trust your business because you don't have the proper presence on those platforms to begin with. So it's really important to realize that, yeah, your customers may be there, but you need to put a serious effort where you're going to put that effort and understand if you're just trying to get a place, a space holder on a certain platform like X or Twitter, which is Twitter, Facebook or whatever, then understand where you're at with those platforms and understand what you're trying to achieve. Okay, it's time to break a lot of hearts with the last one. And that is you can do it yourself for everything for your business when it comes to marketing and design. You know what I'm talking about. Those design programs out there that's got all those templates. Those website builders with all those themes. The start marketing in minutes. Build your own Facebook page. Boost your own post. I get it. I get it. You're trying to avoid the expertise of someone who lives it. Now, I will tell you that from an agency perspective, and talking to literally I don't know how many businesses since 2006, I have yet to run across a business that has come to us and has said their do-it-yourself effort worked. I've not run into that yet. Now, they may have had some successes, but they're not good successes, and they're not cumulative successes. What I mean by that is they're not building and getting stronger. They hold on tighter to the little bit of things that they're doing that works, unknowingly not knowing what's not working. I know that's a weird thing to say, but basically they just don't know what they should get. And so the temptation... is that in the commercials for some of the stuff is just so clever. They'll have somebody on there that you look at and you go, I'm probably smarter than that person, and if they can do it, I can do it. Now, that's why they have those people on the do-it-yourself ads and commercials. They want you to believe that that person was able to do it, and they're crazy successful, And they want you to think that a large part or a portion of their success is because of the things they did themselves using that stuff. This is probably the hardest myth to try to convey to someone. Now, here's why. Because they see us as having a dog in the fight. Meaning that if I'm talking to someone one-on-one and I say, you don't want to use do-it-yourselfers. they're probably thinking in their mind, well, this is an agency that don't want us to. They want us to spend money with them. Now, the reality is, is that I've seen it. I've seen everyone that comes in and out of this office, in Zooms, on phone consultations, on everything. I've seen it. And the reality is, is no one has come across my desk that has ever had great success with these programs. It's something cheap. So I'll leave you with this. If you have the choice of buying something cheap, but that cheap thing would not get you what you're trying to achieve, would you ever buy the cheap thing to begin with? Obviously, the answer is no. No one would do that. I mean, why would they do something like that? And so the idea are these builders are cleverly built where they make you think that you can accomplish something that professionals have spent a long time trying to perfect. I mean, going back and, you know, again, I mentioned Edward Bernays in the last episode. You look at some of the different tactics and strategies and then just knowing the amount of time and effort and energy you have to brainstorm and change things and alter them in order to make them effective. It's just not there. And don't buy into this AI thing. Now, granted, AI is doing some Pretty incredible things. Matter of fact, some amazing things. But it's not simplifying the processes. It's actually adding a lot of complexity and requires a lot more expertise in order to harness the power of artificial intelligence in a meaningful way. So just using AI for very simplistic thoughts is not going to work. And ultimately, let's say it does work. It's kind of like that if, as of this point, now I don't know what's going to happen in the next year or two, everything's growing exponentially. But if you look at it like this, let's assume that you want a million dollars and you harness that million dollars and you're able to do what you want to. Now imagine everybody on the planet gets a million dollars. How valuable is a million dollars? Well, everybody's essentially at zero point, right? So, It's a million dollars means nothing, but a million dollars in one means a little something, and then a million dollars in two, and et cetera, et cetera, all the way up. And so it's kind of the same thing with artificial intelligence. As we're seeing it develop, we're seeing that it can be used in a broad swath of different ways, some bad, some good. But ultimately, even if it worked perfect for everybody, there's got to be something that makes it unique Otherwise, everybody's just at the same level they were to begin with, just a much more sophisticated starting point. Now, I could be wrong, but that's kind of the way I'm seeing it as of today. So, what are our takeaways? Obviously, the big takeaway is don't use do-it-yourself builders. Look, you're listening to a podcast. I don't know you. You probably never will reach out to us. I have nothing to gain by telling you not to use do-it-yourself website builders. other than giving you an effective resource in this podcast. The internet is a modern-day mythology. It's propped up by powerful companies that are offering services, big tech companies, whatever, do-it-yourself builders, and even people who provide services that want to prop up the mythology of the internet in order to sell what they're trying to sell to you. Now, the reality is the internet is a powerful tool, an incredibly powerful tool, if it's harnessed in the right way with the right expectations. If you miss the mark on that, you're going to be disappointed, frustrated, aggravated, and you may go out of business trying to chase something that truly does not exist. So to be successful, and I know what you're doing. I mean, business owners, man, I can tell you, I've sat around and talked to guys who own businesses because a lot of our clients are our friends too. And running a business is stressful. Everything from finances to making payroll to basically feeding the machine, you know, making sure you got more coming in than going out. Make sure you're not wasting resources. Making sure that every dollar counts. And I understand that. And I understand that the temptation of, well, if I can just do this on my own, then that's less overhead that goes out. In marketing, that doesn't work. It's fantastical. It's a myth. It's fake. You want to stay away from those things. If you're in business to be successful, you need to invest in your business. You need to invest in the midterm, the long term. You need to make sure you get good people that are working with you. And really one of the ways you can tell if you find that good person is how much effort and energy they put into it. Are they really invested in your company? Do they really want to see you succeed? Are they really spending time to understand your business? Are they running reports? Or are they giving you kind of like philosophical marketing banter where they're talking about their thoughts on what colors would be best? or generalizations about where things should be? Or is it built on something a little more substantial than that? So that may be one of the big clues that you have in finding that right person to help you out. You're not going to be able to shop by price. And what I mean by that is you don't pick the most expensive or the cheapest person. I have investigated a lot of these large agencies, and there are many cases where the guy who charges the most does the least and actually has the least amount of resources and competency. I mean, where I'm at, just to show you the games that are played, even in the awards spectrum, there is a hospital near where we are, and everyone locally knows that this hospital is not a good hospital to go to. Everybody knows it. At least everybody that I talked to. But what happens is they recently received an award for something like how great they treat their patients. And everyone got a lot of backlash because everybody knew that this was basically a concocted award to try to counter some of the negative things that they've done in the community. And so the idea is like going based upon solely by awards is also not necessarily a good way to go about it. I mean, I won an award in 2009 with a $26 million company I was working with. And I got the one award, and it was during the economic downturn. And I feel that's a legitimate award. It's not something that I bought or paid for or swayed or even lobbied for. It was something given to me by the CEO of this company. And so, you know, it's like it's one of those things, you know, where the water gets muddy and it's kind of hard to tell what to trust and what not to trust. So do your homework. Hopefully this helps you out and understand that the web is not everything that you may think it is and that there are a lot of games being played on the web and there are a lot of different ways to go down the wrong path. Until we meet again, thank you so much. And I do hope you enjoyed this episode of Over the Bowl.

Introduction: 46:17

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.