What Ice Fishing Taught Me About Marketing

[TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:03 - (Jared Erni): This is the four Impact podcast, the destination for impact driven entrepreneurs striving to live life on their terms and create a ripple effect of positive impact in the communities they serve. Where we put your success stories center stage, dissecting the lessons learned and sharing insights and ideas that'll help you amplify your impact. And now, here's your host, Jared Ernie.

0:00:39 - (B): I'm going to share a little bit of a story as we're waiting for people to join us. Let me just make sure I got my list up. Hey, Peter. Good to see you. All right, so the reason I'm going to share this story is because I actually shared it the other night, and it just reminded me how powerful this is at a marketing example or in the prism of how we view our marketing. But last winter, well, actually, it wasn't last winter. It feels like last winter. It was the winter before that.

0:01:09 - (B): I went ice fishing with my brother, and my brother lives in Utah. And so he took us into the mountains, into this kind of really remote type of lake, deep into the mountains. And when we connect, we got there, we saw, actually, there was quite a few ice fishermen out on the lake. Anyone been ice fishing? I don't know if that's something that we got people all over. So any of you guys been ice fishing before?

0:01:40 - (B): So what you do is you go out onto the ice, you got to make sure that it's a certain thickness in order for you to go out onto the ice. We walked out onto the lake. We saw that there's a group of fishermen out there that were, sorry, hear a little feedback noise here. There we go. There's a group of fishermen already out there and quite a large group, but, and this lake was really popular for ice fishing. We went out there and then realized there was all, there were all these fishermen out there. But my brother had also brought his trailer with two snowmobiles and some shit sleds and a big tent and all of this stuff in gear. So what we did is we actually snowmobiled about a mile down the lake and then out into more of a remote area, and then snowmobiled out onto the lake, set up the tent, dug or carved our holes into the ice and started fishing.

0:02:34 - (B): That trip, we pulled out nearly 30 huge rainbow trout. I think they were rainbow trout that we were catching. We pulled out a massive amount of fish from this trip, and we stacked them up. We had this big picture of them. It was really, really kind of cool. In fact, I'm not sure if I could find it. Real quick while I want to share it with you because it goes along with the story. And then I'm going to illustrate why I'm sharing this with you. Here, let me see if I can find it.

0:03:10 - (B): Okay. Check this out. So I think I can share my screen here with you guys. All right. You see that, that picture there? That's. You can tell that's me and my family, my two older kids, two younger kids, me and my wife, Stephanie. And look at all those fish. It was crazy. The reason that we caught all this fish didn't have to do a lot with, like, we knew how to fish better than these other fishermen or that we were like, you know, you know, doing something different.

0:03:43 - (B): But when these fishermen saw what we're doing, because they come out to the parking lot and cross us and be like, wow, how are you guys getting all of those fish? Because we're. It's dead for us today. And. And, you know, it wasn't a trick that we had. The reason we caught more fish is because we went, we separated ourselves from all the group of fishermen. And when you think about that, this, this is kind of like the same thing with marketing. If you've ever heard of the analogy of the red ocean and blue ocean.

0:04:14 - (B): Red ocean is where everyone is competing to, against each other. There's blood in the water. They're fighting, and it's hard to win in that kind of environment. Well, if you can find a way to separate yourself so that you aren't. Let me see here real quick. I'm going to mute some microphones so we don't have all the background noise. If you can find a way to separate yourself, you move yourself more into what's called a blue ocean, you have far less competition, and in that way, you're able to win much easier.

0:04:46 - (B): See, in a red ocean, you have to be excellent. Excellent. All right, let's see. Okay. I muted it. In a red ocean, you have to be really excellent with your marketing to win in a blue ocean, you can be good and really accelerate because you can. You can get to the top so much easier. I hope that makes sense. But one of the ways that you can separate yourself from your competition, and I. I don't know if any of you have heard of this book, hundred million dollar offers by Alex Hermosi.

0:05:18 - (B): This is an amazing, amazing book. And if you don't do anything for your business, except get really good at turning everything you do into an incredible offer, that'll do more for your business than anything else you can do. If you don't have a great offer, or if you have a mediocre offer, you have to be excellent, extraordinary with your marketing to win. But if you have a really great offer, something that you've worked on that's dialed it in to the right client that would, they would feel stupid to say no to. If you've got an irresistible offer, a truly irresistible offer, you only have to be average with your marketing to win.

0:06:01 - (B): And that's, that's wonderful to know because most of the people here in this group don't want to be marketing experts necessarily. They're just kind of like forced to have to do that part to their business that to do the thing they really love. Right? So that's the good news for you. But the key here is getting really good with your offer to do it. So just to illustrate, one of the components here that you'll, if you ever do, by the way, if you're interested in learning a little bit more about offers, I highly recommend this book. So don't forget Alex Ramosi 100 million dollar offers.

0:06:36 - (B): But this was a concept that Alex learned from Dan Kennedy, who I also highly recommend as his books as well. But it's called it's how you niche down and why there's so much power in creating a niche with your mark, your service. A lot of business owners will feel like if I could just market to everyone that like, because anyone can use what I do. But that's going to be more and more difficult today because you're putting yourself in that red ocean category instead. If you can identify yourself as specializing into more of a niche, you're going to create more perceived value in what you do. And to illustrate this, if you were to create a time management course, let's call it a course or a book where, right, you could sell that for, let's say dollar 19.

0:07:25 - (B): But if you turn that same product into time management for sales professionals, just by specializing in that, you can increase the price of it to say $100 or $99, but you can go deeper with it. Turn that same product into a time management course for outbound b two b cells. And this could be a product that sells for around dollar 500, same exact course. It's just by niching down and being more specialized in a specific area, you're creating way more perceived value in how you do it. Now, what if you took the same program you made it time management for outdoor b, two b power tools and gardening cells reps.

0:08:09 - (B): Now that looks like a $2,000 course. So that's the power of niching down. And one way, not. There's a lot of ways to do it, but one way where you can take what you do and separate yourself from the crowd. Right? Move out of that red ocean analogy like we did when we were ice fishing. We moved away from the crowd and find yourself specialized in a different space and allow you to win. Not just winning more deals, but also allow you to charge what you're worth, allowing you to serve your clients at a higher level and grow a much healthier business.

0:08:45 - (B): So just a food for thought today. As we dive into Q and A's, I wanted to share that something that was on my mind. I'd love to open this up to Q and a for the group. What's going on, and how can I help you? So if you just want to take a minute to raise your hand, we'll just go through the hand raises and unmute your mics, and we'll talk and see how we can best serve you today. Gary, good to see you on here. I'll connect with you here a little bit later, too.

0:09:17 - (B): Let's see. So we've got junior. We've got maybe May van Voorhin. I'm curious, May, is that a dutch name?

0:09:29 - (C): It is.

0:09:31 - (B): Do you speak Dutch? Are you.

0:09:32 - (C): Oh, no, I'm married into that name. You kidding?

0:09:36 - (B): Oh, gotcha. Okay. I had to ask because I used to live in the Netherlands, and so I kind of read it differently, but, like, van Fooren would be more. I speak Dutch, actually, which is kind of weird.

0:09:49 - (C): That is really weird.

0:09:50 - (B): Yeah, I know. Not a lot. Not a lot of people do, but. All right, we got a question from junior. Junior, let me see if we can unmute your mic. How can I help you?

0:10:00 - (D): Yeah, so I have a question. I'm looking to get a virtual office. And, you know, in the virtual office listing, it says, you know, hey, we don't guarantee that you'll be able to get found on Google Business profile. It says right in there. That. That remark yet? It's a, you know, pretty well known virtual office where they actually have offices that you can meet in and conference rooms and mail forwarding all the rest of it. And it's really inexpensive per month compared to what I've looked at from other places.

0:10:37 - (D): And it's a real prestigious address. So it's right on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. And it's like $50 a month for a virtual office. And, you know, you get people see that address, and they're like, wow, you know, this person must be reputable.

0:10:51 - (B): Sure.

0:10:51 - (D): So the question I have is for Google Business profile. You know, is, is it difficult to get your listing to show up in a place like that?

0:11:02 - (B): It's. There are a little bit more challenges to it because Google's changed away the way that they verify, but it's still possible, and if done the right way, it's still within the guidelines that Google wants you to follow, too. What they don't want are like PO boxes or USP or UPS boxes, you know, things like that. There have been cases where it's been a little harder to verify in those locations because now today they want to do like a video verification and they want signage and things like that that you can show in that video.

0:11:41 - (B): And we were helping one client do this who was in the same exact kind of situation he was in, in a virtual office, but they were, they allowed him to create a name plate and put that on an office for him to get video verified. And that may have actually been his actual office in the, in the space. I don't remember the specifics, but if that's required, um, you know, see if you, if you can work with them to do it.

0:12:06 - (B): Now, I have a question, though. When you said they can't guarantee that you will be found on Google profile, was that the virtual office saying this, or was this something you found on Google?

0:12:14 - (D): No, this was actually the virtual office. When you sign up, it says that maybe they've had problems. I don't know.

0:12:22 - (B): Yeah, that's what I was thinking is that sounded kind of like it was probably coming from them. That's one of the most common ways that people try to create more profiles than they then they should. And what Google really wants to crack down on is people who are creating duplicate profiles. So it is a little harder today to get verified in that space, but it's still also within the guidelines. So I would just say, go ahead and try that process and, you know, get the, get the office if it's going to make sense for you. But also, let me ask is, why would you want to get that virtual office versus having it registered from, I'm guessing maybe your home office.

0:13:03 - (D): Yeah. From a financial standpoint, I've read, you know, where if you want to go after business financing, that they, you know, a lot of that's the first thing these banks will look at is do you have, you know, if you have a home office, they kind of shun on that.

0:13:19 - (B): I gotcha.

0:13:20 - (D): And so it's more. More about that and being in the service business. It really doesn't matter that, you know, we have a home address, I guess, from that perspective, because people aren't coming to my home.

0:13:31 - (B): Yeah.

0:13:31 - (D): But, but still, in all, yeah, they really like to see that. They like to see that you, you know, you set up an LLC and you set up virtual office, you know, those kinds of things without a post office box. So, yeah, I guess it's from a credit standpoint, from a business credit standpoint, they recommend that very highly.

0:13:52 - (B): Yeah, I've talked to, that makes a lot of sense. So it wasn't necessarily about Google profile necessary. It was more about other reasons to get that virtual office. But Google profile will be part of that registration.

0:14:06 - (D): That's correct. And then there's also the city itself seems to have more grant programs. So, you know, if you're actually based in the city, that's what it would show up on my LLC registration form and all that too. So I could show that as proof to Google, you know, that my real address is that address, you know?

0:14:26 - (B): Yeah.

0:14:27 - (D): So anyway, that's what I got you.

0:14:29 - (B): Yeah, I can, I totally understand. My business is registered the same way. Uh, however, what I did was I registered my business, uh, with a real business address in Atlanta. But I work from my home office. And, um, I'll say this with a little like, kind of like prelude. So you understand, when I started attractive scale, we started as an agency first, and then we moved into more of a coaching, consulting and course program, uh, because I felt like I could impact more people and truly help serve more people that way.

0:15:08 - (B): So when I first started, I registered my Google profile to my home address, it was a lot easier for me to go through the process of verification there. But everything official is actually registered through our office address with Atlanta address. Does that make sense?

0:15:29 - (D): Yes, it does. And I heard that you can't. It's hard to move change addresses to on Google business profiles. So if you say, you know, if you get signed up and verified at your home office by Google, then if you switch it to a different address, I've heard that they're not. This is all hearsay, so I don't have any proof of this, but I've heard that it's a problem trying to change addresses sometimes.

0:15:55 - (B): It's not that you can't do it, but because Google's cracking down on verifying businesses, usually a change of address will put you back into verifying, and you just have to go through that reverification process again.

0:16:08 - (D): Yeah. So I didn't think I wanted to go through that stuff, if you will, you know, where. So. So anyway, that's. That's why.

0:16:15 - (B): So why don't. I would say maybe go ahead and move forward with, like, securing the address you need and going through the verification process with that address. If you get stuck and are unable to do it for any reason because of that location's information, like, something about that location, I'd say then maybe try it to your home address and see if you can get it verified there.

0:16:39 - (D): Okay. All right, sounds good.

0:16:42 - (B): Good luck.

0:16:43 - (D): Thank you. I appreciate that.

0:16:44 - (B): You're welcome. All right. Any other questions that I can help with, may, go ahead.

0:16:55 - (C): Hi. So I have client, and they are a contractor contracting company.

0:17:03 - (B): Okay.

0:17:04 - (C): And I didn't get too much. I didn't ask too much of the question. Questions about why, but. So when I'm in southern California and their. Their business license and a couple of other. Their paperwork shows the Sacramento address, and then their bank and other paperwork shows an address here. That's at, I guess, a pharmacy that has mailboxes.

0:17:30 - (B): Oh, yeah.

0:17:31 - (C): And I was asking her if she had anything that showed either her home address or her partner's home address, but she doesn't.

0:17:42 - (B): Okay.

0:17:42 - (C): And so I kind of want to give them their money back because I don't think I can get them verified. I mean, I kind of told her maybe she could. I don't know if it would make a difference. Transfer the address of the bank to hers. Is that something that they would take and then get assigned for a truck and then get, you know, if they do a video verification, go from the, you know, the house to the truck to the paperwork.

0:18:16 - (B): Have you tried the video verification already?

0:18:19 - (C): No.

0:18:20 - (B): Okay. So. And they don't have signage for the trucks.

0:18:24 - (C): No.

0:18:26 - (B): So they will want to see some sort of signage, probably, for that kind of business. Okay. But there's no harm in. In trying with what you currently have. And then if that didn't go through, then making that adjustment, because a lot of service businesses register like that. Kind of like, you know, we were just talking about with junior, like, the official business address is this. But we're really working from home.

0:18:53 - (B): And so my. My recommendation would be to try to get this verified at a home address. And if they can get a magnet decal and put it on the truck, then they ought to be able to show that. Show what they need to at their home address, being a service business, and should get verified. But if there's a challenge with that because of documentation needs to also match the address, then just getting the bank to switch that over would be a great idea.

0:19:27 - (B): Then you can try that process again. I don't think you need to give them your money back because it sounds like you're helping them through the process. And it's just like, hey, you know what? There are some steps to this, but let's try this plan and if that doesn't work, we've got this plan and either way we should be able to get it done.

0:19:43 - (C): Okay. Okay.

0:19:45 - (B): Yeah. Does that help?

0:19:46 - (C): That does.

0:19:47 - (B): All right, good. Perfect. Well, anything else? All right, we'll move back over. So we'll get to, we'll go to, I've got several hands up. So I've got, we'll go to Gary Wolf and then back to junior. So let's, let's help Gary. How you doing, Gary? Let's see. I don't know if it's unmuted. See if I can find you in the list here. Oh, yeah, it looks like you're, you're muted. Gary, let me out now.

0:20:24 - (E): Yeah.

0:20:24 - (B): All right, cool.

0:20:26 - (E): So basically my question is, when someone googles your company and, you know, and it shows your company and then it shows the site extensions, are we able to control the site extensions that are seen in high level somehow? I think I might have emailed you this amongst my many emails. I know, but earlier, you know, when you google my Ql solutions group and you go there and they list, you know, get a copy or service call consultation, and then the last thing it says is thank you, which is our thank you, when someone comes in and requests an appointment or whatever, and it just seems awful strange. So is there any way that I can control those site extensions?

0:21:20 - (B): Thank you, that's a really good question. And I didn't, like, think of that specific situation. There usually is. And I know highlevel probably has this, I definitely know clickfunnels does, but where you can hide that particular page from being indexed. So what happens is Google has indexed all of your website pages now and so it's going to kind of like provide that information there. And all we need to do is go in and hide that one page from being indexed and that will go away. But it's not going to go away quickly and instantly.

0:21:56 - (B): It'll just need Google to do a re indexing before you'll see that change go away. But there is a way to do it now that I kind of know exactly what you're looking at, I'll be able to go in and take a deeper look at that this afternoon, too.

0:22:10 - (E): Okay, cool. Yeah, there was a page in there that didn't need and I removed the page because it was duplicitous because it was for booking a service call, but it went to my calendar page. Isn't the process to book a service call? We can book a service call much quicker than having a meeting beforehand, you know?

0:22:29 - (B): Right.

0:22:29 - (E): And so I removed that. That was something that we made, you know, that wasn't supposed to be published, but I just want to try and get, you know, I'd like to have it kind of clean.

0:22:40 - (B): Yeah, that makes sense.

0:22:42 - (E): Yeah. Cool. Thanks.

0:22:44 - (B): Yeah, I will. I will make a note on that. But it's just basically an indexing prompt that needs to be adjusted there. So we can. We can do that. I'll show you that a little bit later this afternoon. Great question. Anything else, Gary, that I can help with?

0:23:00 - (E): No, I really just came to kind of lurk on my lunch hour and other people's questions, because usually I learn from all that.

0:23:08 - (B): Awesome. All right, cool. And I know we'll be meeting up a little bit later, too. Good deal. All right, let's move over to Wolf. Hey, Wolf, it's good to see you here. Let's see here. Maybe you need to check your mute. Hey, everyone. Wolf manufactures guitars. This is so cool. And I was diving in and taking a look, but I'm a big fan, as you can see. I've got mine. How can I help you, Wolf?

0:23:42 - (F): Yeah, man. Good to talk to you again. So I'll try to make it as quick as possible. So, kind of a vague question. As you said, I build guitars, and I'm also the highest rated guitar repair shop in Austin, Texas. Now, the thing is, I have probably 30 other competitors, but the majority of them are in South Austin. I'm in north Austin. If you know anything about Austin, 22 22 is a road that, you know, basically cuts off north and south Austin. Anybody north of 22 22 comes to me.

0:24:14 - (F): However, there are hundreds of thousands of people in South Austin who don't come to me because there are closer competitors, and I need to try to break more into that market and get people from South Austin to come north. And basically, I'm showing up, you know, nine or ten on the list a lot of times in south Austin, but I'm, you know, number one or two, anywhere north of 22 22. So one person said to create a second profile.

0:24:42 - (F): And so, I don't know. I just don't like the whole thing, but I just wanted your opinion on some of that.

0:24:48 - (B): Yeah, now, great question, and thanks for sharing a little bit of context of that so I can better understand the, the biggest, like, no, no is to create a new profile here.

0:25:01 - (F): Right.

0:25:02 - (B): Google sees that, they're going to shut you down on that. It's not like it's going to. They're going to turn off all your profiles. It's not that severe of a violation, but they definitely don't want multiple profiles if it's truly not another location for your business. But you do have the advantage of a couple things. Number one, as you continue going through the training in local search academy, we're going to help you do things to your profile that will greatly increase your relevance, which should impact your radius of where you're ranking in the geographic area. But there's also factors that we can't control, such as how dense the competition is in south Austin versus North Austin.

0:25:44 - (B): And so another thing that you can do here after fully optimizing and getting into the strategy with your Google profile is called local search ads. And we have a module that will come up on this. As you go through the training, I get questions a lot about can you unlock certain blocks of lessons? And if it's necessary, I can actually get you access to like an unlocked version of the whole program. That's an older training that we did of every, all these lessons just to get you that access. But the reason we lock it is so that you do the things in the right order, spend enough time on those things to master it, so that you've got the right foundation when you get into local search ads for it to serve you best.

0:26:26 - (B): But local search ads is a way where you can pay for. Most people are familiar with traditional search campaigns or pay per click ads with Google, the purple links at the top. But a local search ad is sponsoring your Google profile to show up number one in the map section. And the reason that that's gives you leverage is because there's far less competition that knows how to do this. Yeah, yeah. We'll show you how to do it. And then you can target south Austin with those ads, pull up number one in the map section, and then when people click it and go to your website, you have an amazing offer strategy that will move them forward and start nurturing them. So they're going to want to make the effort to come up to North Austin to see you.

0:27:11 - (B): Perfect. Yeah, that's a great question. Anything else?

0:27:15 - (F): Same. Good for now, man. I appreciate your time.

0:27:18 - (B): Awesome. Well, it's great to see you again.

0:27:19 - (F): Absolutely. Thank you.

0:27:20 - (B): You're welcome. All right, let's go back to junior, then Peter and then art. So, Junior, another follow up question?

0:27:28 - (D): Yes, just thought of this. So I was wondering about your program and you'd mentioned the locking and so on. So I did notice that. And so how does it work? So if you're, you know, if I'm doing the first couple of lessons I finished them up to, is it automatically open up the third lesson then? If I did the first two, for example?

0:27:49 - (B): Yeah, no, I actually kind of wish that it would do it like that. But this is not, we didn't create the platform that this is all built in. It's called circle communities. So what it does is it's going to unlock a new one every week based on your starting point of the program. So every week? Yeah, every week. And if you want to know exactly when that next block lock of lessons will open up, just hover over it or click on it and it will show you the date that it's scheduled to unlock.

0:28:17 - (D): Okay. And so, and then your program is a monthly program, the subscription, yeah.

0:28:24 - (B): So it, what we found is marketing is so dynamic, it's not gonna serve you well to go through a once and done course if you're not staying on what the cutting edge of what's working best. And we used to have a program that was just kind of like a standalone course. But also the challenge is that 70% of people don't ever finish courses. And, and so we really wanted this to not just be a course, but a community and a program that people can dive into, stay relevant, stay on the cutting edge, and be part of a community that supports each other too. And I'm starting to see people actually responding to posts and giving great feedback.

0:29:06 - (B): They're not just learning from us now, they're learning from the collective experience of others. And that's the beauty of it. So it is designed as a monthly subscription. There's no contract long term thing. You can cancel anytime. But with that you're going to not just get the lessons blocked out for you in the right order and foundational process to build on, but also these weekly lives so that you can join a group, ask questions relevant to your specific situation.

0:29:33 - (B): We're going to constantly keep you updated on the best marketing strategies and new tips every single week. And then when things happen like we see with Google releasing a new update, an example would be a few years ago when they added to what they call it the policy for spam on Google Profile. Now they no longer like duplicate photos, posts, logos or videos. And so things like that, we want to make sure that you're aware of.

0:30:01 - (B): So that's why it's monthly now.

0:30:02 - (D): Okay, when you say duplicate, you mean that on the same platform or you mean that it's okay to, you know, if you have it on YouTube, you could put it on your Google Business profile as well.

0:30:14 - (B): Oh, yeah, yeah. So you can use this on different channels. That's just fine. But like in Google profile, if you posted the same photo five times, they don't want those kind of duplicates in the Google profile.

0:30:25 - (D): And one last question. I think it's. The last question was, but I have a contractor also that I'm working with, and they have built, you know, build homes in different towns and do remodeling projects in different towns. So I think the recommendation is for them to create video and or photos of these different properties and that will allow them to get found in other locations. Is that still the case? So if they're in one town and five towns over, they build a house.

0:30:55 - (D): They might be able to get found in those other locations based upon having the tags on the photos and the videos be seen by Google.

0:31:06 - (B): Yeah, yeah. There is some relevance to that. And it's somewhat limited in the way that, like, your Google profile will give you your best impact in a 40 to 50 miles radius from your business. And so a lot of service businesses that are taking photos with their phones, I would do more photos than video here, but more photos with your phones and then posting those to Google profile, you're basically giving a geotag that your phone's already attached to that photo of that location, telling Google where you've served. And we've seen that with other service businesses that there's a concentration of calls coming from a certain area because that's where they've been posting photos from.

0:31:41 - (B): And we've been able to expand and contract service areas based on photos being published. So you definitely have. That's still relevant today that we see. The other option would be layering that with local search ads, because if they get a little further out than that radius or if there's other factors that we can't really control in the market that is making it harder to rank in certain areas, then local search ads can be another layer to add to that that will help serve them, too.

0:32:08 - (D): Awesome. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

0:32:11 - (B): You're welcome. All right, I think we're going up to art and then Peter. Hey, Art, how can I help?

0:32:23 - (G): Hey, guys.

0:32:24 - (B): Yeah.

0:32:24 - (G): Okay, so I was wondering, what is the best process to be able to work with clients? Google Business profile. Do you go through their. What's the process what, what you were showing is just how do you do your own, what's the best way to do clients and then also being able to do the local ads through that process? Do you do it through the their Google business profile or do you need to get on their Google, their Google identifier and put that into your.

0:33:01 - (G): Yeah, see what, what's the process?

0:33:04 - (B): So, good question. And let me just make sure I got the full context here. You're, sounds like you're an agency that's running managing Google profile for different clients, is that right?

0:33:16 - (G): In the process of learning it? Yeah, I've got some clients interested in it.

0:33:19 - (B): Gotcha. Okay, cool. So if you an easy way to do this is just to have them invite you to become a manager to their Google profile with you. Just give them the Gmail account and then they can add you as a manager to their account and then that gives you connection under your Gmail. So under your Gmail, when you log in, you'll actually see if you go to business dot google.com comma, you'll see a whole list of all the different profiles that you can manage.

0:33:46 - (B): You can also create organizations inside of that to keep it organized for you as well. But what will really help serve you is to have software that helps you manage. There's reporting involved, lots of really good things about, you know, that you don't get in. Well, let me put it this way. Google's not a UI or user interface company, they're a data company. And so when it comes to the logging in to like their ads or even Google profile, not everything is clear and not everything is built for the best experience.

0:34:29 - (G): Not intuitive for sure.

0:34:31 - (B): Yes, exactly. But there are great UI companies out there that are creating software that integrates with the API and allows you to have much better management experiences, especially when you're starting to work with other clients as well. Maple Pro is a tool that we created to do this. But though what I'm looking at right now is making maybe a little bit of a shift to help serve clients even better.

0:34:58 - (B): And I've been having meetings with the CEO of local IO, which has created an amazing platform for Google Business profile. And we're working on an exclusive relationship where we can help you guys have access to that program that will allow you to better manage your own profile or like in your case if you're an agency, have tools to better manage your clients profiles as well. And there's a lot of things that they've done with theirs that I like a lot more than Maple Pro Maples Pro will still serve you well, but I want to give you guys the best experience, even if that means you're not using my software anymore.

0:35:35 - (B): So that's totally fine with me. I don't want to be a software company, honestly. I just built the tool because it was necessary for us and then we started sharing it with clients. But I found getting a real software company involved that can, can build something even better, may be a better way to use it. So I'll be sharing that probably in the next week or so. But if you want to check out local, let's see, is there a chat here that I can type this in?

0:36:00 - (B): Let me see if I can find the link here because it's not how you think it's spelled.

0:36:10 - (G): Okay, is that going to be integrated, you say, or it's not going to be integrated with your map leads or whatever?

0:36:18 - (B): Most likely because of timing and just wanting to serve clients faster than what it would take to fully integrate. It's not going to be integrated, but I'm going to be able to provide something unique and special through our relationship that I'm building with these folks. The link to local, let's see. So there is, I just put in the chat local IO and then May was asking, or someone asked maple. Well, Wolf said, how can I access Mapleets pro map leads pro you can access, it's just app Dot, mapleadspro, dot.com.

0:37:00 - (B): And if you go there, just click sign up if you haven't created a sign up yet and then register and then you'll be able to access that. But we for Wolf, we also have trainings in the process of guiding you through that setup so that you get it done. You're welcome. But IO we're working on.

0:37:18 - (G): Okay, so can you walk through the process then or give me an idea? Okay, so I just send them my email and then they can invite that. Do I ask for an invitation or I just give it to their, send it to their email and then they go to Google business management. Is that correct?

0:37:37 - (B): So there's probably lots of different ways you could do this, but just in my mind, the way that I think I would do this is if you log into your profile and get familiar of where to go and how to do what you're asking them to do. I think the best thing you can do is during an onboarding call, maybe do it over Zoom or whatnot, have them share their screen and you walk them through the process. Because if you ask them to do it, there's a good chance most of them don't know how to do what you're asking them to do.

0:38:09 - (B): And so if you go through the process, say, hey, here's what I need you to do. I need you to open up Google profile. Where do I go? Well, go business dot google.com dot. Walk them through that step. All right, click this button. You want to go here, add my email. The email you want to add is support, whatever it is, and then that will grant you access. You know it's getting done. You know that they're not, it's not because they're delaying it. You're, it's getting it done right and fast. So that's the way I would do is like first party, second way to do it would be to demonstrate it by recording it on loom and then giving sending them instructions to follow your video.

0:38:48 - (G): Okay. All right. And you, and so if I'm going to be doing the ads, I can do that through the Google business profile on their side, or can I integrate that on my side so I have the. All my ads in the same place.

0:39:03 - (B): Yeah. So two things here, let me see if I can google this. If you're doing ads, I would not do that right from their Google profile because that's going to by default, create a smart campaign, is what it's called. And that's a very simplified campaign, basically giving Google control of where to distribute all your ads. And what it usually leads to is lower performance, in my opinion. I like to have more control and.

0:39:36 - (G): Do it like a sub account.

0:39:38 - (B): Yeah. So if you were to, there's two things you could do. Number one, you could create like your own, like you could share a Gmail account, have them log into their ads manager and then add you as a manager to their account. And then it will show up when you go into log into ads dot google.com comma, you'll be able to see, see their ad id number to click on their account. But a different, maybe a better way for really building a foundation as an agency here is to sign up for an MCC account with Google.

0:40:15 - (B): That's called for manage clients and campaigns. And basically this is more of an agency version where you, and it's free to sign up, you just have to get registered. And do you want a link to it?

0:40:29 - (G): I think I have it, but sure.

0:40:32 - (B): I do have a agency, an MCC account with Google?

0:40:37 - (G): I believe so.

0:40:39 - (B): Okay, cool. So if you log into your MCC account, I just put a link in there for anyone who would also be interested. If you go into settings, you can actually send an invite. And if they. All they need to do is provide you their ad id number, you can send the invite to them instead of trying to tell them where to go to add you, if that makes sense. And then they just need to accept the invitation, then you'll always have all of your clients in one place.

0:41:06 - (B): And the unique thing too here is that it also opens the door, because if they have set up a Google guaranteed account, you'll also. By getting access to this account, you'll also be able to access their Google guaranteed account.

0:41:20 - (G): Okay, now the Google guaranteed. That's for LSA also.

0:41:24 - (B): Yeah, that's the LSA. Yeah.

0:41:26 - (G): Okay. But if they don't have that, then I can't get to the GBP.

0:41:31 - (B): No, no, no. It won't. It won't prevent you from going to Google profile at all.

0:41:36 - (G): Okay, so I. So if I have their. Their number, their Google number, then I can go to their. Through that process, I can get to their Google business profile.

0:41:47 - (B): It's going to be two different channels. One is going to be for paid ads, then there's a whole different login process to get into their Google business profile. Each of those requires their own way to connect. So connecting to their Google profile will only connect you to their Google profile. Then you. To do their ads, you'll have to go through the process, probably through your MCC account to connect to their ad account.

0:42:10 - (G): Okay, so I don't do that. The. I don't. So how do I build their local ads for their Google Business profile? Do I do that in the.

0:42:21 - (B): Yeah, so local search ads. Once. Once you have their. You're connected to their ad account. Most of the time. I don't know if it's. Most of the time. Well, you're going to need to have their help for one little part of this. This is going to be how you create an asset out of their Google profile. Because if you don't have access to their Gmail account, you are. It's unlikely you'll be able to act to connect their Google profile to their ad account.

0:42:52 - (B): But what I usually do is show them exactly how to do it in a video. Or this could be just an onboarding call piece where like now you have their ad account, but you walk them through connecting their Google profile as an asset to their ad account.

0:43:06 - (G): Do you have a video you can see me?

0:43:08 - (B): I do. It's actually in our training in local search ads. It's going to show you how to create an asset out of your Google Business profile.

0:43:15 - (G): Okay. Is that on the. You. You gave me the. You shared. You opened up the LSA for me or the older one?

0:43:21 - (B): It's on.

0:43:22 - (G): It's in there?

0:43:23 - (B): Yeah. Okay. It's in both. One is the program that we're running today. It's probably maybe still locked for you based on the timeframe, but if you go into the older one version that we unlocked for you, you could drop right down to local search ads, watch all of that. But they will walk you through that step, those steps that you need for an agency. Yeah, well, for an agency or for individuals, it's the same process either way, to connect that Google profile, but just putting yourself in your agency, in your client's shoes.

0:43:58 - (B): In order to connect to their Google profile, it has to be done through their Gmail, through their ad account. So they need to log in, they need to click the asset, and then it will discover based on their login, it will know what Google profiles they're connected to. The reason you can't do it, I've tried several times. The reason you can't do it from your agency account may be for different reasons.

0:44:21 - (B): Maybe my reason is because I'm using my MCC account with a certain email and all of our Google profiles are connected with a different email. So it doesn't see that. So it might not be an issue for you thinking about it. But if you get stuck, let me tell you this, watch those videos. If you get stuck on it, let me know. Send us a support and we'll do a loom video for you to watch.

0:44:45 - (G): Okay, cool. Yeah, that would, that would help out. And the other question is that.

0:44:54 - (H): You.

0:44:54 - (G): Know, you're, you're look, looking at using leads pages and those are separate from the website a lot of times, or maybe with a subdomain. Do you have to optimize that to be able to optimize the Google Business profile?

0:45:11 - (B): What do you mean by optimize?

0:45:13 - (G): Well, you know, the Google Business profile, what? You know, the photographs and the posts and all the different things with keywords. How much, percentage wise, does it help for the website to be complimentary and showing intent for that to help it rank?

0:45:33 - (B): So is it about, are you thinking about what you do to your website that helps your Google profile rank more or what you do to your website to help your website rank more?

0:45:45 - (G): The website to help the Google Business profile?

0:45:49 - (B): Yeah. So if you do, probably there are deeper, more complex things you can do. So I'm covering more of the simple stuff, typically because I don't want to overcomplicate things for a lot of our clients. But if you do a sitemap, that's going to help. You know what, what I mean by a sitemap? Yeah.

0:46:08 - (G): Yeah.

0:46:08 - (B): Okay. So doing a sitemap, that will definitely help. One of the things that we've also done is when creating posts, create or services or whatnot on your Google profile, create a supporting page for that service or post on your website and then use that URL in your post to link back to that page instead of the main landing page. But because it's all attached part of that sitemap and all of that, then you're actually creating a different string to tie back to your website.

0:46:43 - (B): And that's another way to kind of like strengthen the web. Does that make sense?

0:46:47 - (G): Okay. All right. So I guess what I'm wondering is what's the, how much value does that is like, okay. It's not really going to rank into the top to the three pack if you're not doing that or it will.

0:47:03 - (B): That's more like added stuff. You're going to get your biggest impact from following the three main things. After once over, optimizing your profile photos, number one, posts, number two, and reviews, number three. Just doing those three. Getting really good at managing all of that. You'll do more for your profile. That's going to be 80 out of the 20.

0:47:29 - (G): Okay. I'm just wondering because it's, you know, I'm working with car lots and different places like that. I don't know, they're going to let me go into their website and because a lot of those, they don't own and they're just, yeah, leasing it kind of. So I don't think they're going to give me the authority to come in and optimize anything. So anyway, so that, that helps me on that. Oh, okay. So I have a client that has, it's plumbing and pools, his name and pools. And so he wants to go, he thinks people are looking up at his place and thinking all he does is work on pools and so he wants to do a name change, his Google profile. He, he hasn't really used it and he doesn't have the right address on it or anything like that.

0:48:20 - (G): So do we start a new Google profile because he wants to switch his name or do we use that old Google profile and try to switch the name on that and then optimize it with everything?

0:48:35 - (B): Yeah. Well, I think the biggest thing I would ask is does he have reviews on that Google profile?

0:48:41 - (F): Two.

0:48:42 - (G): Only two?

0:48:43 - (B): Okay. I mean, he's really starting from ground zero. It sounds like, either way. So you might find it easier to just start the process with a fresh setup. In that case, usually if they have, you know, even a small number is five to ten reviews. I actually like to start with at least that. But if it's two, you, you might, you might just have more loops to go through, having to change the name, change the address, reverify, all of that stuff than just starting a new one.

0:49:16 - (G): Okay. All right.

0:49:17 - (B): And.

0:49:18 - (G): And so his corporate namers, his sole proprietor. He'd be doing dBA for that. Will Google want to have a proof of dBA?

0:49:30 - (B): I haven't seen that, but Taylor in our program would know better because he handles more of that kind of verification process stuff with clients. I am not sure, but maybe digging into the guidelines to review that, what they're looking for, and that might be, give you a little bit more clarity on that specifically. But it's. If he's got signage on his truck that matches the name of the business, that should be fine.

0:50:02 - (G): Okay, good. Okay. Thanks, man.

0:50:05 - (B): Yeah, you're welcome. All right. And we got Peter. And then after Peter, I'm going to have to head out because I've got a meeting at the top of the hour. But it's good to connect with everyone. And I'm so grateful to be able to have these weekly meetings with you guys. We'll schedule another one. By the way, I'm curious. I've asked this before, but I'm just with the new people on. Would you guys be interested if I were to do more of these, but also bring in experts from different industries, such as, you know, systems and operations or email strategists or things like that? Do you think that that would be helpful and valuable to you guys?

0:50:38 - (G): Yeah.

0:50:39 - (B): Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, I'll be doing that. I've got a vast network of people who are always happy to jump on with our community, so. And I'm actually last, I invited the CEO of local IO to actually be part of this and he said absolutely. So we'll may be bringing him in as well. So I've got Peter. How can I help you today, Jared?

0:51:03 - (H): I'll be brief if I can. I'm in a highly regulated industry as a driver improvement program, so. Traffic school.

0:51:13 - (B): Yeah.

0:51:14 - (H): And I service all of Virginia, no other state. I wanted to get your take on what kind of offer I could create. And then I. As a second question, I wanted to ask about reviews. I have a service that I've been using now for the last three months. I switched over after having been with another previous service for five years. And they're all proprietary, but they're not Google reviews. So I wanted to open it up more again, to getting Google reviews.

0:51:51 - (H): The last one I got was four plus years ago. So how do I reignite that?

0:51:58 - (B): Yeah. So if you wanted a platform that helps serve you well, bird Eye could be an option to look in. Have you, have you seen bird Eye?

0:52:05 - (H): I have. I used them as my first one, and it didn't work quite as well. I then switched to Trustpilot, and I've been with them for five years. I've just recently left them, and I switched to a different program called Shopper approved.

0:52:20 - (B): Okay, and, but these programs, they keep your reviews off Google platform?

0:52:29 - (H): No, they do share it, but the reviews are, at least with shopper, shopper approved, the reviews are theirs, but they will filter over to Google reviews.

0:52:42 - (B): Okay.

0:52:43 - (H): So they will translate into stars, so to speak.

0:52:46 - (B): Okay. Gotcha. Okay. So if not, and you don't see clients personally. Right. It's more of a virtual thing that they're going through.

0:53:00 - (H): Correct. Everything's done online and on the website. So I will ask for reviews once they complete the purchase process, and then again at the end once they've completed the course itself.

0:53:12 - (B): Ah, cool.

0:53:13 - (H): Okay, so I've got, I've got a couple of different channels that way to ask for reviews, but it's probably.

0:53:23 - (E): A.

0:53:23 - (H): 3% return rate if that, of the ones that are targeted, and everybody's targeted for reviews.

0:53:31 - (B): Okay.

0:53:31 - (H): But there's a very small percentage of people that will actually provide reviews. Good data or indifference.

0:53:38 - (B): I have an idea, and this is something that I don't see a lot of people doing, but it works really well because it's so different than what you would expect. And have you ever seen the platform video ask?

0:53:54 - (H): I have not.

0:53:55 - (B): Okay, so let me, let me look up the link and I'm going to pop it in the chat video ask. And here we go, in the chat. Okay, so I just got the link there if you wanted. So video ask is a unique platform because it almost creates a sales funnel out of a series of videos with conditional logic. And I found that video is one of the most powerful ways to show up for people, especially in a virtual world, because they can connect to a real person through that video better than any text or content, images even.

0:54:36 - (B): And so what I do is I've created a video ask Funnel that doesn't ask for the review necessarily. It asks for their feedback on their experience first, saying, you know, hey, thank you so much for your purchase your feedback helps us improve the program. We're always looking for new ideas on how to make this better. So I'm curious if I could ask you just a couple questions here, and it's a little video and says, how would you rank your experience with our program so far?

0:55:04 - (B): You know, five stars, four stars, three, two, one, etcetera. Based on their answer. It then moves them to a specific video saying, thank you for the five star review, or thank you for the four star review. What could we have done to make this five stars for you? And they can give a response and then it can say, hey, we really appreciate your feedback. We're glad you've had a four star experience. We'd be one.

0:55:27 - (B): We'd love if you'd be willing to share at least the positive experience that you've had with our clients on Google. And it then moves them into actually leaving the review on Google. If it's three stars or less, it's not going to send them to Google, it's going to send them to a way to leave a response so you can get back to them and fix the issue. But if it's four or five stars, it will actually give them an invite to Google. It sounds a little complex, but the reason I think this might be interesting is because most people, if you're sending them a link to leave a review, that's what everyone else does too. Too. It's not like really different. It's not that pattern interrupt that a lot of really great marketers talk about.

0:56:04 - (B): But if you create a video and send them, hey, I'd love your, hey, check out this quick video I made you. They're going to click on that text link. They're going to see you talking about, hey, I'd love to get your feedback on your experience with the program. Would you just share with me how it's been so far? 54321 stars. Right? Easy for them to click on and they're going to go, whoa, never seen anything like this before. It works great on mobile.

0:56:29 - (B): So does that, do you think that that might be something that would serve them a little bit better or increase the conversion on those?

0:56:36 - (H): It may very well, absolutely. I just don't know if, if my current program will function that way, but I can certainly ask.

0:56:45 - (B): Gotcha. All it needs, all you need to do is be able to send a link via text or email or both to them. And then I actually have set this up. If you get into the review section in our training, I walk you through my exact fun so you can see the whole process of my video review funnel. And then at the end of it, if you go through that funnel, you're going to get my blueprint on how to set this all up for you. So I basically, it's kind of a, I think I'm kind of clever for this.

0:57:19 - (B): I'm giving you training how to do exactly what you do. If you go through my funnel and leave me a review for it too, does that make sense? So I'd love to hear within local.

0:57:29 - (H): Search academy or where do you find it?

0:57:31 - (B): Yeah, in local search academy, you'll find it. And if we want to be specific, let's see, members, let me find it real quick. So it would be under applying reviews, excuse me, amplifying your reviews, and it would be the video review strategy. And you'll actually see it embedded right into that lesson.

0:58:08 - (H): Great, I'll review that. Last but not least, if you could just talk real quick about suggestions on offers for this very highly regulated business, since I'm even capped at the amount of money I can charge a student.

0:58:25 - (B): Gotcha.

0:58:26 - (H): So I'm trying to stand apart from the hundreds that service that are licensed in Virginia to offer that kind of service.

0:58:36 - (B): Yeah, that's interesting. So I think I'd need a little more time and some context and to sit on it and just work through some thoughts to give you some good advice on it. But one thing I found that's really helpful as far as getting ideas, maybe thinking outside of the box in some different ways is leveraging a little bit of AI involved in this process of thinking about how you think through your offer.

0:59:02 - (B): And if you haven't seen it yet, in our training under increasing your conversion, there's a lesson, second to last, one that says using AI for offer ideas.

0:59:18 - (H): I've not gotten to that yet, so I'll be paying particular attention to that.

0:59:23 - (B): Yeah. So that's going to show you a prompt that we created to help you uncover some unique ways of crafting your three point offer framework, leveraging chat GPT. So we give you the whole prompt. You just need to copy paste it, fill in your pieces, and it will show you some interesting ways of positioning yourself that you may have not have thought of before. So that could be a good, a good starting point to kind of think through some of that.

0:59:48 - (H): That's great. I appreciate it.

0:59:50 - (B): You're welcome. Well, I hate to do it. I've got a run because I've got 1 minute and a Zoom call that's happening here. But I love, this is actually my favorite part of the week. So thank you so much for showing up. I look forward to seeing you guys again. And we'll get another one scheduled here that you can sign up here very soon. So I'll do that a little bit later today. Take care.

1:00:12 - (Jared Erni): Thank you for tuning into the four Impact podcast, where we're all about driving positive change through entrepreneurship. Remember, your impact matters and your journey matters. If you found inspiration in today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback fuels our mission to empower impact driven entrepreneurs like you. You can stay connected with us on social media and go to forimpactpodcast.com

1:00:44 - (Jared Erni): to take our impact marketing challenge. Keep pursuing your dreams, making an impact, and living life on your terms.