How Small Businesses Can Do Better Digital Marketing

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Amy, and she is a CEO of a digital marketing agency.

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She transformed into that from her previous profession of helping with open heart surgeries.

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That's quite a leap, and she's also the host of a podcast.

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She'll tell us a little bit about that.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks, Eric.

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Thanks for having me.

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I appreciate you having me on.

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Absolutely so.

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Before we jump into your remarkable story, why don't you give us a minute or two of context about who you are and how you've transformed in your career?

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My name is Amy Singleton.

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I'm from Oklahoma City, oklahoma, born and raised here, and in my former life I was a registered nurse.

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I did open heart surgeries for over a decade, also a lot of brain surgery as well, but I specialized in those open heart surgeries.

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My own health wrecked that career and took me out of that for nearly for several years, and what led me to starting this agency actually was I started to feel better in my body, but I wasn't physically going to be able to go back to nursing with all the health problems I personally deal with on my own.

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And so my husband, a serial entrepreneur, had many businesses in the past and we were looking at the time he was working about eight hours away from home and we wanted to bring him back home and put me back, put my hands back to doing something that I could physically do, that my talents and interests were geared toward, and we were just brainstorming one day and he said you know who I've paid a lot of money to throughout all my businesses marketers, people like lead services.

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There's this lady who has a list.

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I paid her a lot of money.

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I paid all of these marketers so much money and I never felt like I could trust them.

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I wasn't sure if I was getting an ROI or what was really happening, and he looked me dead in the face and he said these four words that started our business.

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He said we can do better.

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He's we have to do better.

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Business owners deserve better than what I got from these national companies or these one-off guys that said they were experts.

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There had to be something in the middle, and so that was what inspired us to start our journey.

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It's very ironic because back before I ever became a nurse, my interests really were more geared toward journalism, performance, speaking, writing all of these things that are so naturally inclined for a marketer.

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My husband had a background in pastoring, which you know.

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If you're in marketing.

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You already know there is a huge number of people that were used to be in ministry and now are in marketing.

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It just goes hand in hand, and so it really made for a beautiful fit, and my story of Remarkable kind of leads right into that.

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But it's what led us to where we are today offering what we offer, turning websites into lead generating machines for business owners.

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All right.

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So let's hear a little bit about that story, about some of the best marketing you've done.

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Yeah, okay, here it goes.

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So when we first started out in our agency, we were trying to be better, and what my husband knew of marketing was that he had paid a lot of money to lead services.

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And if you know the way those lead services work, someone asks for a paint job or something on their house and then they have 10 painters calling them and it's a race to the bottom for who can sell it for the cheapest and who's not annoying this poor business, this poor homeowner, right?

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So we were doing a model that a lot of marketers are familiar with called rank and rent.

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We would go out and we would put a website out on the internet, rank that website organically with search engine optimization, and then we would take those leads and we would exclusively partner with a local painter or concrete person or someone in the trades typically, because what we thought was a lot of these people in the trades can't afford a website, they can't afford SEO, they're just getting started, they need leads, and so we had a great business selling those leads to a variety of industries in our area, making a lot of business owners really happy with the ringing phone, which is great for them, and they weren't having to compete.

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But we had this particular website that was in the painting industry and my husband, joseph, and partner in business.

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He had owned several painting companies before.

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In fact, at one time, before the housing crash of 2008, he owned one of the largest painting contract companies in Oklahoma city and they had 10 to 15% of the new housing market here and 125 employees, millions of dollars in revenue.

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But of course, the housing market had crashed that.

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But, being that experienced painter, he couldn't quite find the contractor that he really trusted, that he wanted to give those leads to and partner with, and he also, as the entrepreneur, could not unsee the opportunity that was flowing through the forums and through the phone calls that were coming into this website.

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And we had a painting company.

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We went down and filed a DBA.

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Next thing, we have a three crew painting company and it proved the concept, eric, that that proved the concept that nothing more people think you have to have a business plan, they think you have to have a beautiful wrap truck, they think you have to have all of these things to get started.

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But what you really need to get started is work.

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You need to have something to do.

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You have to be able to have that lead so you can make money so that you can afford all those other things.

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So, with nothing more than a great WordPress website with all the technical things, all of the SEO done right and some content and things that we were doing right and a Google business profile, we were able to start and grow a three crew painting company, which we sold graciously last year to a local painter that needed that branding and that lead flow.

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But it proved the concept to us, and so it was at that point that we went all in on doing traditional agency style work, building the brands of companies.

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We knew and saw the potential in SEO and in the or that organic flow of leads, and so we went all in and we've been doing that ever since.

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So building a business organically through lead generation allowed you to do the bootstrapping you needed to build up the business, to sell it and then to get into the business you really wanted to get into, which is doing the marketing for other people.

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Yeah, we were running the agency and the painting company at the same time, so that was not fun.

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It was a very busy season for us.

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But yes, we Sounds hectic.

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yeah, it was a very busy season for us.

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But yes, we Sounds, hectic, yeah it was very hectic, so talk a little bit about now the work you do with your agency, how you turn websites into lead generation machines for businesses.

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Yeah, so we start with the messaging.

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We start with what are we saying, because no matter what budget you put behind a PPC campaign, no matter how much content you put out on your website, if you're not saying the right things to bring your top of funnel consumers to you, then it's just going to fall on deaf ears.

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So we do a lot of messaging language.

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We follow the story brand framework.

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If you're familiar with Donald Miller and his whole camp of story building, a story brand highly recommend that book or getting with a certified agency or guide to help you through that language, because it is it's a phenomenal framework to be able to say the right thing.

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And so then we take that framework, we implement it on a website and we do heavy search engine optimization.

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We pay a lot of attention to that Google business profile and those local listings in the very hyper local space to get those phone calls and those forms coming in.

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And then, of course, we want to be building an email list, because you've probably heard it said a million times before if this is a marketing podcast, the only two things that you can own is your email list and your website, and so many business owners don't even own their website and they don't know it.

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They're just wrapped up in someone's platform.

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So we use WordPress websites to make sure that they're fast, friendly and able to really handle the growth of a business as far as trackability and things on the backend when we begin to do ads and things like that.

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But yeah, just that organic growth of getting that phone ringing for business owners is super helpful.

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Of course, we also implement things like database reactivation campaigns, ppc, social media ads and other things to sometimes supplement that search engine optimization flow, because SEO is that long-term.

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It's typically a long-term process, right, especially to be ranking for a lot of keywords in all the areas that you want to be.

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So a lot of supplementation happens sometimes on the beginning, but truly building that organic lead flow through your website is what a business owner wants to do, because, especially if you have goals of selling that business, being that handshake guy and everything is with your relationship, of course relationships are important.

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Of course knowing your local community is important.

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However, if you don't have a website that's generating leads, it's going to be really hard for you to sell that business to anybody other than your family or someone there that's working with you that want to grow them and build them up over time, and I think there's 5 to 10 million small businesses in the US at any given time and there's millions of businesses out there that are trying to figure out how to do this, how to get off the ground, how to bootstrap it, how to get things going just to get the first business coming in so that they can grow.

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And there's so many scammy type things out there that you get emails about of like I'll set appointments for you, or things like this, that don't really work, but you mentioned the two things that small businesses can really own is their website and then turning that into their lead machine and their email list.

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What have you really learned in helping small businesses build their business like this?

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What's one or two things that you would say across your clients?

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You've learned from working with them across your clients?

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you've learned from working with them?

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Yeah, on behalf of the clients.

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What I've learned is that building that email list is very valuable and so many business owners want someone to come to their website and marry them.

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Please land on my website and make that phone, make that appointment.

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Like I'm ready to do business, hand me your cash.

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It's like going ready to get married.

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No dude, can we get coffee please?

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And so one of the ways we help our business owners build their lists is by giving something away.

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Many of us have done it lots and lots of times to give our email address and our name and our phone number, sometimes for a downloadable thing that still works it, people love it, and that's the way that we build that email list by giving something away as a date.

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For instance, if you are a plumber and you want someone to make that phone call because they have a clogged toilet, but maybe they're just doing their research, maybe they just want to know can I snake this hot wheel or this Barbie head out of the toilet on my own?

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Give them a guide on how to do that, tell them they don't want to do that, but you're giving them value right away, so that then you have your email and then you can start dripping value to them.

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You can start overcoming objections.

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You can start educating them about why they need to have a plumber that they trust in their lives, so that you can nurture that relationship, instead of just rushing right up and saying, okay, make your appointment, let's go get my butt crack in your door, we're ready to clog your, unclog your drain.

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No, they want to date you, they want to get to know you.

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They need to be nurtured.

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In today's world of the educated consumer, they can go and learn and find anything they want, but when someone embraces them as a human being with a need to solve a problem, then people will start to pay attention to you.

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So that's one thing that's really huge on.

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Building that email list is just giving away massive amounts of value, whether that be on your socials, on your website or wherever you're communicating.

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Absolutely.

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There's so many creative ways that businesses can do that so that they can build up a relationship with people by giving them some value in advance.

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The world of SEO on the website side has gotten so complicated I think it's evolving very quickly as Google and others try to adapt to the AI universe.

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The question used to be whatever your question, Google has the answer.

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Now it's a little bit.

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Maybe ChatGPT has the answer, and so I think that it's interesting how things are evolving.

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And it used to be that the first page of search results was organic and you can get there, and now there's all kinds of different things happening on the first page of Google search results, including the local listings, like you mentioned.

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It seems like complicated enough that a lot of businesses would need some help from an agency to do it right.

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Oh, a hundred percent.

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There are websites you don't want to.

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There are websites I won't perform SEO on.

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If it's a website built on what I would consider like a lesser platform that's not going to grow with that client, then it's a complete disservice of me to even offer SEO on a site that's going to be really expensive for them to replace one day, when it has 100 pages versus 20 now.

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I highly suggest consulting an expert before you start trying to perform search engine optimization.

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It takes me and my team of over 100 people just to keep up, like what you said, with what's going on.

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What does Google want?

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What are they looking for today?

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What does the backend need to be like?

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What do we?

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There's a million different factors that go into it, especially on the technical side of it, and definitely an expert is necessary.

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And so what advice do you have for business owners about how to win, given the environment today?

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The economy overall is a little bit tough these days.

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Most people are of that opinion.

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And then you have all these changing dynamics with digital marketing and marketing channels, these changing dynamics with digital marketing and marketing channels so broadly.

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When you meet with businesses and start giving them advice on what they should do for their marketing, what advice do you broadly give them?

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Broadly be online.

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Today people are searching online more than ever.

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Also, it's a multi-pronged thing, absolutely Creating relationships, especially if you're a local business.

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Creating those in-person relationships is super important and I highly suggest that people network, get to know their community, get to know the people and create relationships for those referrals.

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But ignoring the online piece can be super detrimental, especially when you have the mindset of this is the way I've always done it.

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It's always been a handshake and I'm in the yellow pages.

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The time is now.

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The time is now to be online and to start pouring into your online presence, especially your own website.

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That free Google business profile listing that so many business owners just ignore.

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Optimizing that and filling it all the way out, giving Google the information that it needs to understand your business so that it then has the opportunity to serve you up, is just.

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It's more important than ever to really it's like you're creating a relationship online, just like you're doing in real life, with people being a value, being prompt, being courteous, being easy to work with.

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Those same concepts translate to online.

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So making sure your website is fast, making sure it's answering all the questions, making sure that it's easy to navigate and it's not a pain in the person's butt.

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You don't wanna go into a brick and mortar business where it's a pain in the rear to find the bathroom or find the exit or find the checkout no difference on your website.

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And so, answering those very top of funnel questions that people are just asking about creating value for them, making it easy for them, making it fast for them All of these things go into your business, whether it be online or in person, and that's the advice I give is to do both.

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Fantastic.

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I agree a hundred percent.

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I think that's great advice.

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So, amy, thank you very much for being with us today.

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Thank you for sharing these ideas.

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We appreciate it.

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I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends so they can also hear about it, and I'm going to link to Amy's website and her podcast in the show notes so everyone can check those out.

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Thank you very much for being with us today.