#5 - Before the Launch: Planning a Smart Business Expansion (Lessons from a cabinet maker exploring a new market.)

In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken Carroll walks through the early planning stages of helping a current client—a custom cabinet maker—explore a new business direction: storage solutions for mudrooms, pantries, and laundry rooms.

This isn’t a success story (yet). It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the real questions, trade-offs, and strategy conversations that happen when a business wants to grow but needs to do it wisely.

From evaluating the market and setting priorities to juggling a budget and avoiding common traps, this episode is ideal for business owners who are in the “what’s next?” phase and want to build a smarter path forward.

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

Transcript

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

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Ken Carroll. So you want to expand your business or you have a new idea, but you don't know exactly how to go about it. There are so many choices and so many options. Oftentimes, trying to get things started is a lot different than trying to keep momentum for something you already have. If you're starting a new business or you're trying to grow in other areas, this episode of Over the Bull is for you. So a client of ours came into the office and he works in cabinets. And he does a really good job of cabinets, and he's been doing it, gosh, for a long time. And he's been a client of ours probably for a little less than 10 years, probably. And he wanted to expand his business into doing things like closets and storage spaces. Now, this particular client, he has a large building. outside of an interstate. And on that building, he has the big words, custom cabinets. And from that traffic, he gets a lot of business. And he also gains business from our Google business optimization, our website optimization, and not as much on paid ads. And so he wanted to expand into being able to offer custom storage spaces for homes, you know, like pantries and bathrooms and closets and garages and mudrooms and things like that. And so his whole objective with meeting me this week was to kind of talk about, well, what do I do and how do I expand into it? So he came with some ideas. And so essentially, even though he's well established, he's trying to crack a new market within the business that he's already working in. So those questions, one, how do I expand into this other division digitally? He's also bought another, not bought, but leased another area of the building beside where he's at. He wondered what kind of signage to put out that would capture people's attention. And then he wondered exactly what he should do. So he came with like ideas of like, do I have a separate website or the same website? Because the price points were different for the two products. Now, before we go deeper into this, I want to kind of break down a little bit about his current status prior to coming into the office. Number one, he has a website that does custom cabinets. and that Custom Cabinets website is performing well for him. He's got a Google Business profile that's also working well for him as well. He wanted to have a separate website built for the storage components or the storage features because he didn't want to muddy the water because the price points for his cabinets are a lot different than the price points for storage. And what he felt was that it would be diluted if he were to put something on his website that has that lower price point. Then he has the words custom cabinets huge on his warehouse. And it catches a lot of people's attention, and he likes the way that that worked too. So we had to come up with some ideas about what to put on this building years ago when he had the space. And the idea was to put some messages up there that were very obvious as to what he did. And so custom cabinets was a logical way to do that. We also had just finished rebranding everything when he first came on with us. And so we had the challenges of a new domain name, new branding, getting his Google business profile updated with the right information, a lot of things like that, a lot of logistical challenges. And those can be challenges, especially when you're trying to gain momentum for essentially a new website address. So once we crossed all those hurdles, this is where we're kind of at as of today. He's happy with the amount of traffic that he's getting, and he wants to kind of get the same momentum for this new division. Now, as I mentioned, the new division, it's a good market, but the price point is not quite the same as cabinets. And the reason being is it doesn't require the same amount of energy, effort, resources, you know, all those other things in order to produce it. So it's a lucrative market if he can get into it and he would do a much better job than most other people in his market. So here we are. How do we eat this elephant? He's sitting down in my office with me and wanting to know what do we do to grow this new storage end of the business. Now, when he came down, as I mentioned, he had these ideas. Should we do social? Should we do paid ads? Should we do organic search engine optimization? Should we continue to have a separate website? Should we combine those two websites? Would that create confusion? Just lots of questions. So the first thing is if we stand back and analyze exactly what he's trying to do, the cabinets and the storage spaces have a logical continuity between the two. So the challenge is not whether or not they would fit together on one website. The question is more about price point. You know, would that possibly dilute one product? Or if they saw the prices of the cabinets and everything with that, would they think that his storage spaces were also going to be too pricey compared to his competitors? Then, of course, he's also got the logistics of the can solutions of different kind of kits that you can buy for those kind of spaces versus what he offers. And then he's got an idea of the competitors that he's looking at and what they offer. And so breaking all this down isn't as simple as just dropping a couple pages on his website for storage spaces. There is actually a lot that goes into it, and a lot of his comments have a lot of credibility. Now, the first thing is to think about, well, this guy's in tuned, right? You know, he's not just saying add a couple pages to my website. He's thinking about his demographic. He's thinking about how they would shop for these two different products in two different ways. And it's very reasonable to think like that. And so breaking it down into two websites historically made sense. Now, It also was in tuned with how he was selling and marketing product. He wasn't trying to sell the storage directly on the internet, um, through paid advertising or things like that. He was going to use it more as a, um, kind of like an accent offering that he would do through his sales effort and things like that. He wasn't really looking at a deliberate, intentional, kind of what we would call a primary, um, sales. Cause you know, a lot of times in sales, you have things where you bring people in on one offering, but then you want to sell them on other offerings once they come into your business. And so his primary effort was cabinets and then storage was a secondary effort. And it was his strategy. And honestly, he just kind of came to us and asked us to put it together because he was going to use it and kind of explore and dabble a little bit in the storage arena. But here he is. He's had success at it, and now he wants to get more deliberate with the effort, and he's bringing these questions to the table. Now, there's another aspect to this client that I have to consider, and that is his investment in terms of resources for actual advertising. It's how much business does he need in all actuality. It's the kind of market position that he has versus the do-it-yourself kits and things like that that's out there within the market. And it's also looking at where his level of comfort is going to be in all of this, because I've worked with him for some time. I know that he doesn't want to put a lot of money in advertising dollars, but he's open to the concept of it. And he's done some minor improvements. work years and years ago, but it wasn't enough of a budget to really make a dent in what he's trying to accomplish. So let's talk about that for a second. When you're looking at selling things on the internet, there is a concept of, well, how long does it take someone to be ready to make a decision from the first time they engage with your company? Now, This is usually called something like the buyer's journey or the customer journey. And there's a lot of factors that go into it, such as, you know, is it an impulse purchase? So we have a lot of luck in the tourism industry selling low price point tickets. But when it becomes a higher price point ticket, the customer's decision is more complex because it requires more of an investment. There's more of a thought process involved in that. And so when you look at what he was trying to do with paid ads, the customer journey was more lengthy. You know, just think of it like this. You're looking for T-shirts. You know, you're going to spend$10 or$20 on shirts. Well, that's a pretty easy decision. But if you're looking to buy a car, well, that decision is more complicated. And then if you combine that with the buying cycle, the sell cycle, or the... the ecosystem, which is another term for it. People, when they approach your website, based upon the way that you engage them on the internet, they may have already done a lot of homework and they may be closer to making that purchase decision. However, if they've never heard of you before or they need to investigate you as a company versus other companies, then that can also require a little bit more time to engage with them and gain their trust. And so that leads to, well, how do we first engage someone who may be ready to purchase cabinets but may not trust a new company they've never heard of before? You know, we need low commitment offerings. We need ways to help customers feel more comfortable to make that first layer of engagement. Now, when you're buying tens of thousands of dollars of cabinets for a home and there are different choices out there, then of course to give someone that level of comfort is more complex than telling someone that they can buy a t-shirt. And the worst thing that happens is it doesn't fit and you send it back or lose 20 bucks or something. Just not that big of a deal. So if we circle back around to the concept of him wanting to not merge his custom cabinets with the custom storage elements, you can quickly see why that that could also create layers of confusion or instant points of confusion. this guy is going to be too expensive compared to other people or other options, or may not be the right option in this case. So as you can see, as you break it down, it's really not just as simple as saying, I'm going to add storage offerings on the cabinet website. And essentially, This is a new business. Even though he's got a website and he's got all the pieces in place, he's got a ton of experience, he sells cabinets, it's a natural extension, but the market is completely different. So in essence, this division is like spinning up a new business, even though it's already an established company. So what do we do? How do we help this customer out and how do we help them turn the corner was a big question. And as you can see, there's a lot of inroads and outroads when it comes to this stuff. And there isn't necessarily a bad decision. The question is, is where do we start? How do we test it? And what makes the most sense for the budget and what he's trying to accomplish that means everything from his marketing budget to his production capacity to the competitors that are out there? giving him a strategic advantage based upon what he offers, and kind of culminating all this into something that's tenable, something that he's going to like, and something that does give him the maximum opportunity to succeed. Because from a marketing standpoint, here's the challenge. You know, you want customers to start to see that the benefit of what's going on because you want to make them have confidence in what you're offering. And so there is this kind of like ramp up time. No matter what you do, there's a ramp up time. So one of the common things in marketing is people will tell you, you know, that they can do certain things in certain timelines or things like that. And it's just simply not true. It's just simply not true that you could spin up his campaign and then just automatically start bringing in new business for him simply because he's already established and has credibility. Now, we may be able to add the offering and trickle in some business from that. And again, sometimes we do hit the home run. But in this case, I'm not feeling that that home run is going to happen right out the gate. So question number one is, well, what should he do as far as marketing? Here we are. We're at the crossroads. Now, the one thing that I also need to consider is his understanding of the market. So my inclination is to combine both products on one website and kind of deal with the hurdle of the price structure. Because his cabinets, they go into nice homes. He doesn't build these little standard kits that you buy online. I mean, he can build these cabinets to the inch. He measures every single place. Whenever I go out with him and do photo shoots, he's looking at each cabinet as far as like how the doors line up. He's looking at the hinges. He's looking at where they're positioned. He's looking at every single element, even the wood grain this guy pays attention to. So his target audience, even when it comes to storage, you know, mudrooms, pantries, bathrooms, things like that, they're also going to be of the caliber where they're going to want something that is a little nicer than the average bear gets, and they can afford to pay for that as well. which to me is a signal that maybe this price point is not quite as big of a deal as maybe he thinks it is in his market. However, I do have to respect his understanding within his market. So you see there's a trick here. There's this push-pull, and if my client did not come in and sit down with me and talk to me about this, then I would not have inserted that into the equation. Now, after carefully weighing it and looking at his competition that does offer the cheaper solutions, I'm going to give him the option of two paths. So for me, I don't think that the price point is that big of a deal, especially given that he needs to carve out a niche within his market, which means that he needs to be probably the more accurate guy. Everything that he's done is based on accuracy, high quality, great workmanship. things like that. And so my recommendation is let's go ahead and combine the two and let's carve out that niche, which will give us a few benefits. Benefit number one is we have only one website to manage, which also means we only have one website to worry about its reputation and its credibility. And we can piggyback off the credibility of what else he does. And so by doing that, we're kind of gaining momentum right out of the gate. Now, again, I'm not that worried about the price point based upon what I've seen within the market and where he's at. Now, once we... do that and we build that out, then what we'll do is probably take the website that we have built that he was using as just like a secondary revenue stream for his business. And we will likely take that and do a 301 redirect back to that main page of storage on his current website. So what that means is a 301 is a fancy way to say you take, like, say, for example, mydomain.com, and then you've got mydomain2.com. What you would do is you'd point mydomain2.com to mydomain.com slash storage. And that way, that domain will take people right into that one section. And that's just to kind of capture any momentum, any kind of cards or anything that he's handed out using that website address so he doesn't lose that in the process. And a domain, it's only going to cost about$20 a year. And so it's not really a big investment to go ahead and do it, even if it gains minimal traction from what we're trying to do. Now, I'm also going to give him option number two. Because you've got to think about, I've got to respect him and where he's at because he knows his market more than me. Yeah, I've been around since the early 90s doing marketing and different things within the spectrum, but I'm not living day in and day out in his business. And so the other option is we break out to site number two. Now, the downside is... Do we piggyback back into the cabinet business? Does that look kind of squirrely to do that as a separate website? Does it make sense to do that? The downside is it's going to take more effort to manage two websites. It's going to take more effort to build credibility for two websites. Also manage all the other nuances as well. What do you do when it comes to Google business? Do you build another profile? Do you not build another profile? Would it be considered a separate entity as far as how he structures it? Is he going to start a new DBA that he would put this under or to be his other? Because there are certain regulations with Google business when you go in and you start building all this stuff out. It's not just simply going into Google business and just spinning up another free profile page. There's a lot more that goes into the logistics of it. And if you don't do it correctly, those listings can get suspended because Google does have certain rules. Like, for example, one of the classic ones are people who try to put keyword phrases that relate to their business in the name of their business in their Google profile. For example, if I put Integris Design Web Design, I'm putting a keyword that's not the name of my company as the title of my company. And I have actually seen marketing people go in and make this recommendation because they say that it gains momentum. Some will even go as far as to say, spin up a DB And make sure you put your keyword actually in it so that you can legally get away with it. But here's the deal. If Google doesn't like it and they suspend it, they're going to suspend it. And I've seen those things happen a lot with one particular company we work with that a third party. Basically, it's a franchise and the franchisees were following some bad advice. And so we've had to kind of go back in and bring that back in. So as you can see, it gets a little complicated. But if we do that, then what we would do is spin up a separate website market to that second website. Now, the pro, if we're going to pull out the pros, is that people who are looking probably for storage units, like for mudrooms and all that, they probably don't want to go through the whole cabinet section. So the cabinet section could be a distraction rather than something that would help them make a decision on whether or not to use HandMark consider him, meaning that, you know, if his primary efforts or efforts are cabinets and then he then they see this little thing on the side, then they kind of have to weed through the cabinet section to find the other section. Now, at first blush, you would think, well, that's really not that big of a deal. Well, it could be a big deal. And the reason being is when someone comes to your website, you literally have 7 to 10 seconds to catch their attention. So the question is how in the first 7 to 10 seconds do we get someone's attention if we're showing a bunch of really high-end cabinets and we're trying to convey the idea that we do storage for closets, which are kind of different. And so by having a separate website, it can be nothing but the storage. You know, we can go straight into pantries and bathrooms and things like that. Well, on the cabinet's website, we have to kind of, if we combine the two, we're going to have to find a way to disperse those two elements and make it make a lot of sense. So from a marketing perspective, both could work. Different amounts of work would go into each one of them. And being able to give both options to the client and let them choose, and then being able to see the logistical challenges of one of the options versus the other options will be one of the things in which he will get to make that decision. Now, my role is... to look at what he suggests, take his input in and then cultivate a plan around his decision. And so if he comes back and says, yep, let's go ahead and combine those two sites together into one, then I can see the search engine optimization benefits. I can see how having additional content is going to help. I can see how we could have a much more robust website for the one versus having two kind of micro websites where if we do those two micro websites, then we have to clearly convey to the client that, From an organic perspective, we're kind of rebooting the process, which then takes us to the next point. And that is, do we worry about search engine optimization right now? And to what degree do we worry about it? You see, these are blasphemous decisions, you know, to some people. Well, of course, you've got to work on search engine optimization. And of course, you've got to build that into the plan. Well, no, that's not necessarily true. You see, from a business standpoint, your goal is to not follow a standard process that makes you feel good or satisfies some itch in marketing and design. The goal is pretty simple. The goal is to drive people that are more likely interested to buy your products so that you have an opportunity to sell them on those products. It's pretty much that easy. Now, if you can stand on the side of the road and fulfill your coffers and have enough production, holding a sign up on the side of the road and bringing people in versus spending 20 times as much doing paid advertising on the Internet, then you probably want to hire that guy to stand on the side of the road and hold a sign up and dance, right? So the same thing is true with the Internet. And so when we break these two sides down, we could decide to go with the paid ad strategy and not even worry about the organic implications. Now, of course, there's always things that you want to do as best practices for search engine optimization. There are certain site structures and considerations that go into it. And of course, yes, yes, yes, there's a good argument for building up an SEO plan long-term. 100%, there's a great argument for content marketing. 100%, there's a great argument for social media posting. 100%, there's a great argument for paid advertising. 100%, there's a million different ways to dive into this and build a strategy. Now, the question is not... Should you do all of them or, you know, fall for whatever argument you have? Because in marketing, you also have to remember that you got the marketer too, right? And so if the marketing person has the capability to offer social media posting, they're going to give you all the reasons that you should be using social media for this marketing strategy, right? Just like if you're specializing in paid ads with Google, well, of course, everything should be paid ads. If you're a search engine optimization guy, well, of course, search engine optimization should be what you should concentrate on. But the reality is, no. The reality is that's not true. The reality is you are trying to sell a product or a service to people and you want to get to them in the most effective way possible within a budget that your business can manage. Now for small businesses and startups, there is a balance. There is no unlimited budget. There is no unlimited let's wait for return on investment. There is no money generated from best practices with putting in certain tags on a website. Now, of course, there are good practices and certain ones should be followed. But if you get lost in the weeds of trying to chase all these little details, it's going to become a distraction for your business. It's not going to be optimized in the right way. And frankly, it's not going to work. And you're probably going to run out of money before you get to see the fruits of it or just give up on it. I mean, that's just the reality of business. So if we circle back around, then the idea is, okay, if we go with option number two and we build out this microsite, then we're probably going to go into the world of paid advertising. Now, of course, we have to think about the value proposition and we've got to think about those emotional triggers that we talked about in the last podcast to make sure we have the right call to action. But there are some benefits to running paid ads initially. Number one, it's more instant gratification. Search engine optimization is not overnight. There's not magic to it. It requires work because Google wants the most credible websites to pop up in the search results because that makes their search engines more valuable to the average person. And so you've got to build credibility up, and there are ways to do that over a period of time. Conversely, why you do paid ads is you get this kind of ability to promote and advertise within your market and you get to do it fairly instantly. Now, when I say instantly, what I mean is that you can launch the ads, you know, pretty much as pretty quick. I mean, we can launch them within a day. But the idea is once you launch them, then you also need to track their results. You need to modify them, change them. And now you've got to give Google the opportunity to kind of understand what you're trying to achieve through those ads and give it time to work through that and build up that, for lack of a better word, understanding of meaningful actions for those ads, which means you've got to invest in paid ads and the time it takes in order to figure those things out. Because even within Google, you've got, gosh, I don't know how many ways, probably eight different ways that you can initially set up ads. And then there are subsets within each one of those that can impact what you're doing. But if we have the separate website concept, then we're probably going to lean more heavily on paid advertising. So then we have the next question, the sales funnel. Because you can do paid advertising in Meta. You can do paid advertising on Google. You can do paid advertising on Meta and Google. You could do paid advertising on LinkedIn. There's lots of different places that you can do paid advertising, even on publications that are real popular in storage or whatever. You could even do advertising within that spectrum as well. So you see, it gets more and more complicated as you go. But we need to simplify it because we're going to have a very simple budget to work with and a very simple premise, and we're trying to do what we would call a proof of concept. So to come back around on it, regardless of which way that he takes... We're probably going to lean heavily on paid advertising initially. And then what we're going to do if he does option number one is we're going to put in a lot more optimization factors into that product. We're going to recommend that he also does a lot more when it comes to content marketing. We're going to piggyback off of the effort that he's already got in cabinets, and we're going to go after a more exclusive market when it comes to People who are looking for storage solutions, you know, people who care about things that fit in nice tight spaces. Versus someone who is going to use– back in drafting in high school, we would call it the make-it-fit method. The reason we called it that was because if you got close enough, you were graded on a curve. If you could follow directions to kind of make it look somewhat like it, he would– the instructor in the mechanical engineering or drafting class, he would grade on a curve based upon how close you got it. So we had this thing called the make-it-fit method. And so people who want things exact. Now, so paid ads are interesting. Uh, because they can do a lot of things for him regardless of which path that he takes. Now, one gives us a little more strength to start working on organic placement. Um, we've already got our credibility kind of stacked up a little bit. We've already got our, our profile situated. We've already optimized the, uh, what we would call the NAP score, uh, name, address, phone number for his Google business. Uh, we've already done those things. Um, but paid advertising can work either way. Uh, Now, what's great about paid advertising is And by the way, I've won awards on search engine optimization. Big believer in search engine optimization. Matter of fact, I do know that it still converts at a very high rate. For those of you wondering, should you do paid or organic? There are statistics out there to show that up to 60% of people make decisions in the sponsored or paid area versus the organic area. So ultimately, best idea, best world ever. What should you do? The answer is yes, you should be in both places. But if you have to choose based upon logistical factors, like in this one, paid ads make a lot of sense. Now, the reason they also make sense is we can perform things like keyword research to find the best keywords, which, by the way, if you ever do a search engine optimization campaign, you should have a set of research performed in your specific area about keyword volumes before the first optimization is done and understand exactly what's going on. And you should also have a competitive approach. research perform too to see what your competitors are targeting and what's most successful for them. All that can be found before you do the first search engine optimization. If someone's jumping into it and saying they're optimizing your website and they didn't give you the data, it's kind of like you preparing to go on vacation and not knowing if you're going to go skiing or go to the beach. It makes absolutely no sense not to have a bearing on what you're trying to get your website ranked for on the Quick tip, if someone's selling you a search engine optimization campaign, and at the very least they did not give you a keyword analysis based upon your service area, not based in the United States, based in your service area, then it's going to have minimal results because you don't know what you're trying to hit anyway. And if you don't have a competitive research, to me that just seems... kind of outrageous because your competitors, why would you not want to use that data, especially knowing that search engine optimization is one of these deals that's kind of, it's a lengthy thing. It's not like you're just going down to the store to grab a drink. You're actually taking a long trip with search engine optimization over a period of time. And you want to make sure that the effort that you're doing are for searches, which are what keywords are, means what you type in to Google that those words are the most effective keywords and why would you not spend a little bit more money to understand your competitors before going into such an endeavor. But if we jump back to the paid advertising portion of this, then we can look at a couple of other things that are really interesting too. We can actually quantify those keywords in a very unique way before we do the first bit of SEO. What I mean by that is if we take, say, for example, we target mudrooms, pantries, garages, closets, laundry rooms, whatever may have you. And then we go back and we put those things into a paid ad campaign, even with data that we get directly from Google based on the geo and everything like that. Then we can actually run those keywords and we can find which ones are the most effective for his business and positioning. Then we can evaluate it and say, okay, is it something we're doing wrong on why we're not converting better in other arenas? Or is that naturally stronger in his target geographic areas? You see, and then once we understand those data points, Then what we could do is go back and retroactively start making some search engine optimization decisions based upon real-world data, based upon how his website is engaged with by potential customers. So in other words, we quantify the keywords before jumping into search engine optimization. And so there's a benefit to running paid ads. Now, the next question is, should we run them on... Facebook or Meta as well? Or should we just run them on Google initially? And then how does that work? Because part of what we want to do is we want people to be exposed to the brand and want people to click through and see it. But then after they do a little bit of homework, we don't want them to forget him. And so there's a couple of different ways to do that. You can do retargeting campaigns in Google where you can stay in front of those people. Or within Meta, you could try to also broadcast to similar people in places, blah, blah, blah, within Meta's sphere too. And if you keep in mind that Google is for direct searches and Meta is more for targeting groups and audiences in a different way, and knowing that we have a limited budget and knowing what this market is, we're going to probably start with paid advertising on Google. And then what we're going to do is see if we can start to gain momentum and conversions and interest in that arena through initial marketing and some retargeting strategies, which maybe I'll talk about some of those retargeting strategies in the next podcast. That may get you coming back. Don't mean to lead you on, but maybe I'll remember to come back and do that. And so once we come to that, then we go, okay, do we worry about Facebook pages initially? Do we worry about these other things? Are we just trying to gain momentum? Right now it's proof of concept time. And we don't have to have the whole thing figured out today in order to run the campaign to get it. Now, of course, you want a serious effort. It doesn't mean that if we go down this road, that we're just simply going to spin up some ads, haphazardly throw it on a landing page, it's not well thought out, not think through the emotional triggers, the value proposition, his SWAT profile, strengths, weaknesses, things like that. We're going to consider all those things, but we're going to do it very deliberately and more from a sniper rifle with a limited number of bullets. rather than just kind of throw it against the wall and pray that something works because God's given us a mind for a reason. You know, it's not just a haphazard does not work in today's world. All right. So let's kind of recap what we're going to be doing for this particular client. And I think that's going to possibly help some of you out there who are trying to expand your division. So number one, he gets to make the choice. We can work with either one. We can either have a microsite or combine it into two. I think there's more strength in combining everything into one website. I do think there are challenges with getting people to the section of the website they need to go to, but not in paid advertising because we can direct them straight to the landing page for storage. So we can overcome that obstacle in the proof of concept phase of the game. meaning that we're going to point them straight to the storage pages when they go to the website anyway. Then what we're going to do is piggyback on the credibility. And then we're going to run paid ads and we're going to target a demographic that is not price shopping, but they're more concerned about accuracy and quality and they're more concerned about different aspects. And we're going to fine tune that campaign and the messaging on the landing page in which they come to, meaning that we want to make sure that we're meeting the expectation and we're giving them an easy opt in and an easy way out. to engage with this business. We're going to try different markets, or not markets, but rather different services, mudrooms, pantries, laundry rooms, those kind of things. We're leaning probably more toward laundry rooms and pantries because we're Statistics show that women are more concerned about those two areas when shopping for homes, that and the kitchen. And so we want to target those areas which we think are going to be more effective. Probably won't lock down the demographic to only females initially. But we may quickly move into that arena based upon the results. Then what we're going to do is find which one of those areas are the hottest, which one of them leads to the most phone calls, ultimately which ones lead to the most business, and then we're going to focus in that arena. Because even if people are more affluent, they may be more apt to want to buy– Custom cabinets for a mudroom, then say for something very modest where they really don't care to spend a lot of money in those areas. Usually people that are affluent, they have money, but for a reason. They take care of their money. All the ones that I've known take really good care of what they have, and they worked hard to get there. So once that's done, basically step one, step two, paid ad campaign, running it if he's determined to have it out. Then we basically don't run them to the landing page. We run them to a separate website. As you can see, with this initial plan, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have this separate website. But if we do have it, then we're going to run paid ads to the separate website, go with the same strategy, and then we'll probably feature those different arenas a little bit more, meaning muttering blah, blah, blah. And then we're going to understand our keywords a little bit better once we start converting in a certain click. And then we start to grow them. Then we're going to start exploring, expand ending out, maybe doing some social media posts, some remarketing out there to bring people back into focus. And yeah, Uh, we may do a little bit of, now I'm thinking about it. We may do a little bit of meta marketing initially, just for some retargeting, just, just for, uh, to see what happens there. And once we get all that stuff in place, then what we'll do is grow the campaign. Typically, once we get a client over a three to six month window with that proof of concept, they start gaining traffic, they gain confidence on it. Then we'll start to look heavier into search engine optimization, which has its own can of worms associated with it. And then we can give the customer confidence in the keywords that we're choosing because by then we've done all of our competitive research. We've got actual real world data as to what's bringing him the most phone calls or leads. And then he's going to have more confidence in order to invest in that direction. And then if he continues that direction because he wants to grow more, then we can continue to do it. But if he's already reached his capacity with paid ads, then why go any further? That's his capacity, and we're fulfilling everything he needs in order to stay in business and have plenty of business. And so, yes, there are points where it doesn't make sense for a customer to have so much business they don't know what to do with. And so those are the concepts. And then, of course, let's circle back around to the sign on the building. Why should it be up there? The term storage, even though that's what it is, custom storage, when you think of it and you drive by it, you're probably thinking of like those storage facilities where you rent the little building and you put all your stuff in it. Well, that's not what he does. And so the word storage is already kind of within his demographic is understood as like those storage facilities. little units that you put things in. So what we'd want to do is we want to give context if we use the word storage by using the word like, you know, pantries or what was the other one, mudrooms, whatever those things are, give it proper context. And so maybe initially the first thing to do is to take it, not worry about it if we don't have to invest in it initially, or we could take a stab at it and then try to give it context and then choose what we feel is the most popular keywords based upon the geo area, based upon the data that Google will show us, which you can tell that could be a little bit tricky. We may have to redo those signs, uh, depending upon where the data takes us in the long run. So this will be the conversation and I'll let you know how it goes. Uh, once we have our followup and kind of break all that stuff down in the mix and, um, My preparation is basically doing a bunch of keyword research, competitive research, giving him the pros and cons of each one of the directions, letting him make a decision, understanding his budget, and then pushing forward. So these are the kind of things that you should see when you're working with someone in marketing and advertising or web design. It should not be, let me pick you out a template, let me spin you up a website that's for storage, and let's put whatever you send me on that page, and let me go grab some stock photography, let me go to Canva and build some images. That is a very... So if you're working with someone. And they're building you an SEO campaign. They didn't do all the upfront work. They're not worried about the emotional triggers, your market position. They're not properly looking at all these aspects. They're not thinking about everything that goes into it. Then they're leveraging you in a way that's not the most beneficial to your business. And so you need to find someone who thinks through these things and can basically– for lack of a better word, be your sounding board, someone to debate the pros and cons and give you what you need in order to make a really good decision for your business so that you understand the pros and the cons of the decisions that you're making. And then also say, okay, when do we get onto the train? When do we try it? How long do we try it? And if not, then when do we switch directions? Because even understanding pros The proper timelines to properly fine-tune and optimize things are a whole other set of subsets that go into the decision-making process. So hopefully this helps you out. Hopefully this gives you a little idea into the insight of how we think in marketing and advertising at Integris. So I'm going to work up, in conclusion, hopefully that did help you out. I want to wrap up here. We're hitting about 48 minutes. I want to thank you so much for listening. There have been some pretty good podcasts early on, and I do recommend if you're picking up right here to go back and listen to some of the previous ones. I'm still trying to get my rhythm here, and I'm still trying to understand how I'm going to take the Over the Bull podcast. I'm trying to find my voice. So if you take, for example, Ray Charles, you know, my understanding of Ray Charles was he had to find his own unique sound and it took him a little while to do it. Well, I'm trying to find my unique sound, but the content in the previous podcast are good because they do give you insights and understanding in maybe ways you've not looked at marketing before. And so, you know, as you're riding your lawnmower or doing other things or traveling from point A to point B, maybe a good idea to kind of tune in and just pick up a few tips. I know when I was taking Photoshop courses back in the 90s and we'd spend five or six hundred bucks to take one course for a day or two. And the instructor would say, well, if you learn one thing, then it's paid for itself. Well, you listen to one of our podcasts and you pick up one good thing, it can make a big difference in your business. And when you're talking about 4% to 6% conversions on things like paid ads, if you can increase your conversions by a percentage point, it can make a huge difference to your company. I'm also debating on bringing in philosophical concepts and also giving you a means where you can submit your ideas and questions directly to the podcast. So until we meet again, thank you for hanging in there. I really appreciate it. Look forward to the next podcast and to your success. Thanks again for listening to Over the Bull. I'm Ken Carroll, your host.

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