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My guest on the show today is Drew Barton. Drew Barton is the founder and president of Southern Web, an award-winning digital agency specializing in web development and digital marketing solutions. He is also the author of “The Buyer’s Guide to Websites,” which was written to empower business owners who are in the process of working with a digital agency to build a website. A graduate of Emory University, Drew is an Eagle Scout, an active member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) and a recipient of the International Association of Business Communicators’ Silver Flame Award for an article he wrote about boosting website traffic. In his spare time, he enjoys learning Spanish, investing in real estate, and cheering on the Atlanta United soccer team.

Highlights from this Conversation

Primary Discussion Topic: Marketing without the Why doesn’t work

Related to Digital Marketing

1. 1. What has worked well for you?

• The things that used to work well have stopped

1. 1. 1. You have to iterate your marketing tactics
         1. No one is in the Yellow Pages anymore
      2. Seeing clients pull back on Google Adwords
         1. Bing and Facebook
      3. More client marketing automation and email marketing
      4. You have to drive 100 people to your website to get one lead (call, click or email)
   2. What hasn’t worked well that we can learn from?
      1. Copying tactics from someone else

• Marketing without the Why doesn’t work

2. What are you excited about?
   1. Drift Chat app – https://www.drift.com/
   2. CRM for G-Suite – Streak – https://www.streak.com/

Interview Transcript

Adam: [00:00:09] Hi, and welcome to the Good People Good Marketing podcast, a podcast about non-profit digital marketing and how to make it better so that good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways Eight, a digital marketing agency that specializes in non-profit work and 48in48, a non-profit dedicated to hosting events that build 48 websites for 48 non-profits in 48 hours.

[00:00:31] My guest today is Drew Barton. Drew is the founder and president of Southern Web, an award-winning digital agency specializing in web development and digital marketing solutions. He’s also the author of ‘The Buyer’s Guide to Websites’, which was written to empower business owners who are in the process of working with a digital agency to build a website. He’s a graduate of Emory University. Drew’s also an Eagle Scout, an active member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, EO, and a recipient of the International Association of Business Communicators’ Silver Flame Award for an article he wrote about boosting website traffic. In his spare time, he enjoys learning Spanish, investing in real estate and cheering on the Atlanta United soccer team. Drew, did I miss anything from that intro?

Drew: [00:01:14] No, that was really good, that was really good.

Adam: [00:01:17] You’ve got a killer resume there. I didn’t know you were an Eagle Scout. I’ve known you all these years – had no idea.

Drew: [00:01:22] I don’t wear my uniform too much anymore.

Adam: [00:01:27] I would really like to see you in your uniform! Could you wear that to a meeting sometime?

Drew: [00:01:35] I’m closer to the old man from ‘Up’, than the Boy Scout from ‘Up’. We’ll put it that way.

Adam: [00:01:39] Gotcha.

Drew: [00:01:39] Yeah.

Adam: [00:01:39] Gotcha. Well, you can be a troop leader and get a whole new uniform. See, there’s hope to be had.

Drew: [00:01:45] There … yeah, I’m hoping that that doesn’t happen, but, yeah.

Adam: [00:01:52] Okay, well, I’m excited to have this conversation with you, man. I always enjoy our conversations and really respect what you have to offer in terms of digital marketing. And, so, let’s dig in. Related to digital marketing, tell us something that has worked well for you.

Drew: [00:02:08] Well, I’ll tell you this. The things that used to work well for us have stopped working well for us. And I think that’s part of the evolution of, you know … the marketing tactics that you did three years ago, you don’t do anymore. You know, case in point, you don’t advertise necessarily in the paper Yellow Pages anymore, because that’s not where your audience is. So, we’re seeing the marketing evolve over some time. Well, what I’m seeing more often is that a lot of clients that used to put a massive amount of spend in terms of their Google AdWords, pulling back on that and looking at other networks; whether that be Bing that has a lower cost per click, or Facebook that has a tremendously lower cost per click.

[00:02:56] I’m also seeing clients doing the marketing automation. I’m seeing them rely more on email marketing, because the cost per email is, you know, fractional of a cent, and it’s just, you know, versus going on a cost per click on Google AdWords, you could be paying $8, $10, $20 for a click-through, and using what I consider the rule of a hundred. Like, you have to drive a hundred people to your website to get one contact, a lead, you know, some sort of person to call, click or email you. $8, $10 a click-through for most businesses, for most small businesses, that’s cost prohibitive.

Adam: [00:03:41] Right.

Drew: [00:03:42] If you’re doing $8 for a click-through and it takes a hundred visitors to get one person to call you, your cost per what we call ‘conversion’, is $800.

Adam: [00:03:52] Right.

Drew: [00:03:52] And …

Adam: [00:03:53] So, you better be selling something real valuable at that point.

Drew: [00:03:56] You’ve got to be selling something mighty nice, to [00:03:58] [UNCLEAR] [0.1] with [00:04:00] [UNCLEAR], [0.1] preferably with [00:04:00] [UNCLEAR]. [0.1]

Adam: [00:04:01] Or getting real big donations, right?

Drew: [00:04:03] Exactly. Really big donations, because otherwise your donation is to Google.

Adam: [00:04:09] Right. That’s right. Your donation is to Google! That’s true. I feel you there, yeah, okay. Well, I like that. I mean, you know, I agree with you. I think our tactics do have to change on a very regular basis and we have to be aware of what’s coming up, and that’s really one of the reasons I’m doing this podcast, is to help non-profit marketers stay aware of what’s coming up and help to move and change their tactics as they go. So, that’s fantastic.

Drew: [00:04:36] Yeah, yeah. And when you think about what you’ve got to do, especially in that non-profit space, you know, it’s so difficult. So, you know, the vast majority of non-profits don’t have enough budget to do effective digital marketing.

Adam: [00:04:51] Right.

Drew: [00:04:51] Oftentimes they’re relying on either a Google grant or the apportioned, you know, digital budget that may not be looked at in terms of what needs to be done in 2018 and 2019 in order to appeal to an audience that is not just online, but all the time online, you know.

Adam: [00:05:18] Right.

Drew: [00:05:18] You know, you were talking about, you know, in the old days of ‘television’, you know, they’d be watching four hours of television a day. Well, they’re plugged into their phone, you know, people today, 24/7.

Adam: [00:05:32] Right.

Drew: [00:05:33] And, so, it’s a different audience. The time that’s required to advertise to that larger and lengthier audience is so much more than it was just even ten years ago.

Adam: [00:05:49] Right, right, and the speed with which everyone’s being attacked with marketing is increasing too, and so, you know, all the more reason to stay current and then find ways to stand out from that crowd as well, which is increasingly difficult, but an interesting problem to try to solve, I think. So, moving to the next question: I’m kind of excited to hear this from you then. Related to digital marketing, what hasn’t worked well that we can learn from?

Drew: [00:06:18] Oh, a couple of things. Copying someone else’s tactic. That is, you know, that can be a really bad thing. So, we go to a lot of conferences. We talk to other people that are also, you know, either in non-profit or they’re also, they run a similar non-profit and they’re involved in a networking group, and you talk to them and they’re doing X. And so, what happens is, rather than understand the why they’re doing that and why they’ve had success, they just Control C, Control V, and copy and paste that tactic to their organization, and expect similar results, without stopping for a minute to wonder why it worked.

Adam: [00:07:14] Right.

Drew: [00:07:15] You know?

Adam: [00:07:16] Yeah.

Drew: [00:07:16] “Oh, we did a Facebook ad campaign and we converted xyz.” So, what happens is the only thing that was heard was the proper noun of ‘Facebook ad campaign’, rather than, “Oh, we did a Facebook ad campaign that was targeted to senior citizens that were between the age of sixty-five and eighty-five, that were on Facebook, that liked a certain golf community.” They didn’t hear that part.

Adam: [00:07:45] Right.

Drew: [00:07:45] All they heard was …

Adam: [00:07:45] Just ‘Facebook’.

Drew: [00:07:47] … ‘Facebook ad campaign’, and then they …

Adam: [00:07:48] They throw money at it.

Drew: [00:07:48] … and let’s throw money at it. And so, without really knowing the why and specially targeting those ads to that certain demographic, you know, that I’ve seen a lot of people fail with just that copy/paste technique of someone else’s marketing.

Adam: [00:08:06] Well, I mean, I’ve even seen that in websites where, you know … we talked to a potential new client and, “Okay, well, you know, what do you have in mind?” And they said, “Well, I want to build this website, right here.” “So, you want to build a site that’s similar?” “No, I want to build that exact website, right.” Okay, first of all, you can’t just steal someone else’s work, right? But, second of all, why? Why do you want to copy someone else? Like, you can learn from what they’re doing, but you can then understand why they’re doing it and improve upon it instead of just assuming that they’ve got the perfect website for your business. That doesn’t make any sense.

Drew: [00:08:40] You know, it’s marketing without the why, and …

Adam: [00:08:46] Right.

Drew: [00:08:47] … that’s the problem. So, you know, if you’re not going back to say, “Okay, why are we doing this?”, it’s just sort of like … it feels like my dad. When my dad got a pressure-washer, everything got pressure-washed, right.

Adam: [00:09:09] Including the dog, right?

Drew: [00:09:11] Nothing needed pressure-washing, but he had a tool, right.

Adam: [00:09:19] Right.

Drew: [00:09:20] He had a tool.

Adam: [00:09:22] Everything got pressure-washed. I love that!

Drew: [00:09:21] So, okay, wow, we have a tool called, you know, Facebook ads.

Adam: [00:09:28] Right.

Drew: [00:09:28] Let’s use it on everything. And that’s a really, really bad, you know, way to do marketing.

Adam: [00:09:36] Right.

Drew: [00:09:37] Oh, and Facebook loves it, because, you know, you’re pouring cash in it. But the why is entirely missing.

Adam: [00:09:43] Right.

Drew: [00:09:44] And why did we buy pressure-washer? Well, because the fence needed pressure-washing. Not the house, not the driveway, not our neighbor’s driveway, you know, the original intention was the fence …

Adam: [00:09:57] Right. I like that.

Drew: [00:09:58] … and staying true to the why. And, so, there’s a whole lot of tools out there and not everyone is designed perfectly for every market. You know, I have a lot of clients in the manufacturing space and they’ll ask me about a medium that, you know … Twitter, they’ll say, “Should we be on Twitter?” Most oftentimes my answer is, “Yes, you should have a Twitter account. Should you be using it in order to get new business? No.” Right?

Adam: [00:10:31] Exactly.

Drew: [00:10:31] Because their audience is on a rooftop installing new roofs, not necessarily tweeting about politics or celebrities or, I don’t know, what do the kids tweet about today? Any one of those things, you know.

Adam: [00:10:50] What do the kids tweet about today? That is the question.

Drew: [00:10:55] What are they tweeting about!

Adam: [00:10:55] Let me go look up the trending hashtag. That’s great. That’s great. No, but, I agree with you. I mean, I think having a presence is important, having the ability to respond on social media, and being aware of that, is important, but being particularly active on a platform that doesn’t have your base on it, doesn’t make any sense at all.

Drew: [00:11:17] Yeah.

Adam: [00:11:17] And I think that’s wise.

Drew: [00:11:19] My other … with so many tools that we have today, that we know how long they spend on the site, we know where their eyes are going on the site, we know we can actually measure events and conversions that happen on the site, like what forms were filled in, how many chats happened, how many times the phone number was dialed. I mean, we have, we can create comprehensive reports today on how well each ad campaign is performing, how well each visitor comes to the site, and that’s other big thing is, nothing is done with that in order to either do AB testing or stop marketing with the old way. You know, if you’re spending thousands and thousands of Dollars on ads and it’s not converting, you know, how often, how long do you have to hold your hand on the stove to say it’s hot, you know?

Adam: [00:12:17] Right.

Drew: [00:12:17] Or, in this case, cold.

Adam: [00:12:19] Yeah, that’s right.

Drew: [00:12:19] And so, being dynamic about it is really, you know, really important. And so many groups just take their previous year’s budget, apply it to the next year budget, instead of being a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more flexible with what they’re doing, and really taking a look at what’s working and what’s not, and being okay with saying, “Yeah, let’s stop doing that because it’s not working anymore.”

Adam: [00:12:50] Yeah, well, I think that goes back to what you’re saying about why. I mean, if we’re focused on why we’re doing it, then we start to apply budgets and we start to really think about it correctly and we can plan correctly, but if it’s just, sort of, this automated thing where we’re just copying somebody else, or we’re just copying last year and we’re just, sort of, phoning it in then, it doesn’t work out very well.

Drew: [00:13:11] Yeah, it really doesn’t.

Adam: [00:13:17] Alright, so, last question then, related to digital marketing, tell us something you’re excited about.

Drew: [00:13:22] Last question. Okay. There are a few things that I’ve found in recent times that have really helped with … specifically our firm’s digital marketing, that I want to talk about. One is we’ve started using a new chat app called Drift and that has been – I’m going to be honest, I hate chat, for years I’ve hated chat. You know, clients have called me and said, “Hey, Drew, can install this chat app on our website?”, whether it be, you know, ReadyChat or Olark or any one of those guys, and I’ve jokingly said to them, “Okay, I’ll install it for free, but I’m going to charge about $10,000 when I have to take it off.” Right?

[00:14:25] Then, you know, it’s one of those things where, “Oh, so and so’s doing chat. We should do chat”, without the why of what conversations are we going to have, when someone chats with us who’s going to answer those things, and then what happens once we have ‘a live one’ on the chat, and without that in place, of just, “Oh, hey, let’s put another tool in place.” But there’s some very cool things in Drift – Drift.com – to automate that chat process, and there are some chat automation processes there, so, if you’re not available, they can set an appointment on their calendar and it grabs email addresses and it’s a lot more than just the “Hey, you there? Anyone?”.

Adam: [00:15:16] Right.

Drew: [00:15:16] You know, chat features that are there which is really cool. The other software that I’m raving about these days is a CRM for Google apps, or G Suite, or whatever Google is calling their email product this week, called Streak, and it has revolutionized the way that I go through my inbox to inbox zero. You can classify any sort of incoming email with different phases in a sales process or in a development process, and, you know, if you do development or if you’re in sales, it’s a really cool tool to taxonomize the emails within Gmail or Google apps to truly help consolidate the inbox.

Adam: [00:16:15] Wow, I like that. I’m going to have to try that out.

Drew: [00:16:17] Yeah. I have played with every CRM in the world, and from Salesforce to, like, an Excel spreadsheet, you know, run the whole thing and, you know, the difficult thing about finding a CRM, it’s finding one that you’re going to continue to update and be almost gamifies the process of the leads that come in or the e-mails that you’re getting in your inbox, and, because otherwise, if you’re not going to make that investment into keeping it updated, it’s going to grow long in the tooth and then not be a resource for you.

Adam: [00:17:02] Yeah, that sounds really great. Well, Drew, let me see if I can recap what we’ve got here so far. So, under what has worked well, you mentioned the things that used to work well have stopped working well at this point, and we need to iterate our marketing tactics because nobody uses the Yellow Pages anymore. So, you’re also seeing clients pull back on Google AdWords and seeing more use of Bing and Facebook because of a lower cost per click, and more client marketing automation and email marketing because, again, lower cost per click, you can spend less money and get more engagement from those people. And I think your quote in particular was, “You have to drive about a hundred people to a website to get one lead”, and that’s a rough average but your point was if you’re paying $8 per click or $800 for one lead, you better really leverage that person once you get them, and if you can’t then you might be overpaying something from a non-profit perspective. It’s good for them to recognize that, you know, if they’re overpaying for conversions, depending on what our goals are, that could really work against what the non-profit’s trying to go after.

[00:18:07] For what hasn’t worked well that we can learn from. You mentioned copying tactics from someone else never works well, and, in particular – and I put this in bold in my notes – marketing without the why does not work. I completely agree with you on that. If we don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, we really need to stop and reassess the situation and figure out why we’re doing it and then, based on understanding why we’re doing it, then we can begin to understand what the tactic should be to carry that out and make it work for us.

[00:18:34] And then for what you’re excited about, you said the Drift chat app – which I’ll also have a link in the show notes on the website – and the CRM for 4 G Suite, which is called Streak – again, I’ll have a link for that on the website. And those are two really interesting softwares that I’d kind of would like to check out myself. So, did I miss anything in that recap or would you like to add anything to that?

Drew: [00:18:53] No, I actually sounded somewhat intelligent after that, so it was pretty good. Yeah.

Adam: [00:18:59] You know, part of my job as an interviewer is to make you sound great. So, you know, I’m just trying to do all that here.

Drew: [00:19:04] That worked out, that worked out. Sometimes the ace, sometimes the deuces, you know. That was great.

Adam: [00:19:13] That was great. Well, Drew, do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share with our audience before I tell them … before I sign off, that is?

Drew: [00:19:21] I’m bummed that we’re almost done. I was having such a good time with you, Adam. This is …

Adam: [00:19:26] Well, see, we’re going to have to do this again.

Drew: [00:19:30] We will have to do it again. And we should do, like, a marathon. We should do, like, a 48in48 kind of …

Adam: [00:19:36] Like a forty-eight hour long podcast? Like, just go. Everything you could ever know about digital marketing? All in one brain dump?

Drew: [00:19:45] Don’t tease! Like, we could set that up. We could set up like a forty-eight hour marathon. There actually was one if you remember a few years back. There was like a WordPress twenty-four hour, like a WordPress talkathon, and …

Adam: [00:20:05] I do not remember that. Now, I want to go research it.

Drew: [00:20:08] Yeah, there was like twenty-four hours and it went through the night of just from three to four o’clock. You would go to this … either go to Meeting, or it was a screenshare thing, and which kind of worked well with the WordPress community because, you know, that’s around the world.

Adam: [00:20:26] Right.

Drew: [00:20:27] But, I’ve used up all my time, but, yes, there was one and I think you should definitely look at a forty-eight hour podcast.

Adam: [00:20:39] I’ll give that some serious consideration, my friend, and if I do that, I’m going to I’m going to slot in for a significant chunk of it, because, well, it’s fun talking to you, so, it’ll be a good time for all.

Drew: [00:20:50] Likewise, Adam, likewise.

Adam: [00:20:52] All right. Well, Drew, this has been great. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. And thank you to our listeners for listening to Good People Good Marketing. To get more resources about non-profit digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com, where you can find more podcasts, blogs and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me, Adam, your host, you can find me on Twitter – @ajwalker, on my blog – @adamjwalker.com, where I blog about leadership, habit-building, productivity and the craziness of having five children. Thanks for listening and tune in next time.

 

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash