He’s been one of our Wizard of Ads partners since about 2006. He’s stepping into a role as a sort of ringmaster for many of our partners.

By ringmaster, I mean that he’s making an effort to herd our posse of cats onto a flatbed truck and getting them moving in the same direction.

He’s filling a Colonel Parker role by finding speaking gigs for us and he’s creating events where he can sell our services.

He’s got an event planned for May 16, 2012 in St. Louis and we had a chance to talk about it and he spills all the details in this interview.

I always enjoy talking to Ray, when I can get him to sit still long enough. He’s full of energy and I’m sure that a 25-minute podcast felt like an eternity to him.

BUSINESS OWNERS…you really ought to head to St. Louis for this. It’s a measly $67. Get on an airplane. Make a reservation. Go learn something.

Sometimes you are just too close to the issue to realize what may be wrong with your approach, the words you’ve choosen or the the fact that you might be leaving out something critical. TestMyMarketing.com is a place where you can upload your marketing message and have it critiqued by at least 3 marketing professionals who promise not to hold back. If you can take the heat, you’re message will be tempered by fire.

Back in August of 2011, the Awesome Sauce class at Wizard Academy birthed this baby business that was adopted by a couple of students. Brian Schmitt and Matt Lenhart decided that this was an idea that they could get behind and nurse into a full-grown enterprise. Now, more than half-a-year later, they’ve added another partner, changed the name and are in the middle of another launch mode.

I had a chance to catch up with Brian Schmitt last week to discuss how things are going. You’ll like what you hear…or your money back!

Their mission is to make the techie side of the web easier for retailers. They’ve built a platform for managing a small retailer’s ecommerce, blog, web, craigslist, email and more. Now, with Greysuit Apps they can help you manage the ever-growing complexity of marketing on Facebook.

In the middle of the podcast, I asked how they came up with the name Greysuit. They went into a story about how laid-back they are and how they hardly ever even wear shoes. So, I thought I’d go swipe a photo of them from Facebook to use in this post. What did I find? David Lively in a dark suit-coat and Raffy in a tux. Sigh. So, I grabbed this image off of their web site instead.

Here are the links we talked about in the podcast:

• Greysuit Retail
• Greysuit Apps
• Connell’s Furniture Facebook Page (example of the apps)

She didn’t have enough budget to hire both Paul and I for a full-on web overhaul, SEO and copywriting gig. I looked over the site pretty well. It had some decent copy…buried where nobody could find it. They had a nice pic of their van. Their phone number was almost impossible to find.

I told her that I would try to cash in a favor from my WordPress wizard partner, but that I doubted he would do it. I asked her for a little more budget than she had available and called Paul. I convinced him to create a new site for her and severely limit the scope of client involvement and interaction. I knew Paul could do this one blindfolded and with earplugs in, if needed. He knocked it out of the park, just like he usually does.

He followed up with an email a week or two ago and she finally emailed back with this:

“It’s good to hear from you! I have been meaning to send you an update to tell you how amazing you are. But because you’re so amazing I haven’t had time!

Our website is working just like you said! We’ve been getting quotes and testimonies through the website. Just the other day a gal called to schedule a cleaning and I was taken back because she was talking to me in a tone and as if we had been best friends for many years. She then told me that she reviewed the website and is so happy she was only going to use us!

I know that I still have much to do to get this company functioning properly. But I am so thankful for you and what you have done for us. You have changed the direction of this company and I’m starting to feel the wind in our sails.

I hope all is well with you!”

It was the perfect alignment of project and available time for Paul. He had a brief lull in his pipeline and knocked it out in a day or two. I doubt if I could get him to do it again because he was paid way too little for what he delivered. But, boy did he deliver. He can do it for you too. Let me know if you want to meet The Boom.

About the Podcast:

This week, I’m busy trying to move BrandingBlog to a new hosting company. So…I recorded a conversation with Paul Boomer about what kinds of things a site owner should consider as they contemplate a move.

As we discussed how you should package up your content into boxes and cartons, I inadvertently gave one of my very best lessons on Microsoft Excel as well. I hope you enjoy it.

We mentioned a couple of sites…one being my new host MediaTemple. Check them out.

Another was www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com which is a good place to check first when you can’t get to a web site.

Sometimes it’s just you.

NOTE: That is NOT an editing mistake at the beginning of the podcast. It’s a blooper. I left it in. On purpose.

I was fascinated with his approach to productivity and how it sprang from his battle with Crohn’s disease. His victory over his disease and how he approached the battle is the basis of Ari Meisel’s TEDx talk from May, 2011.

In this podcast, Ari tells his story and shares some of his favorite and most effective productivity tools. He is an advocate of doing away with your To Do List and using systems that simply make your tasks appear at the moment you need to work on them. He is also a big advocate of using virtual assistants to take your focus off of your more mundane tasks. Pretty cool stuff.

All of the links we mentioned can be found on Ari’s site in the description of his Achievement Architecture coaching program.

I really like his approach and enjoyed talking about all of these geeky tools with him.

I met Shawn Phillips a few years ago and have slowly gotten to know him a bit in the last 6 months. I’m one of those “unfit” clueless people who never heard of his brother Bill’s book “Body for Life” back when it was changing the world. I managed to be totally clueless while they grew their EAS supplement company and sold it. I

Yep, that was me, sitting on my ass watching TV while Shawn was changing the shape of the world.

So, why am I interviewing Shawn? Hey, it’s never too late to start paying attention to getting stronger and eating better and growing older with a bit of grace. Is it?

It’s an admittedly awkward interview on my part. It’s half confession, half therapy session.

Shawn’s passion is men’s health in those “middle” years. We’re not young guys any more and we’re not old-timers.

I like his idea of sustainable fitness. I like his Full Strength protein shakes. I like Shawn’s passion for education and his concern for the state of men’s health.

Here’s a chart from his book, Strength For Life, that will help you understand the phases of fitness that he and I discussed. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Don’t expect many direct applications to advertising and marketing. You won’t find them in this book.

However, he doesn’t want to be known for just ringing the alarm bell and sending us all into hiding. So, he will be following the Pendulum with a new book called Invisible Heros. These are the type of people who can lead us out of whatever mess we find ourselves mired in for the next two decades.

If I were you, I’d have a happy movie ready to play after you listen to this one. You’ll need it.

Brett Feinstein - no doubt going negative

Brett Feinstein is a partner in the political advertising agency Pound & Feinstein.

He’s one of those guys that you have to get to know to understand. He’s loved and admired by those who take the time. If you know Brett Feinstein only superficially through Facebook or another near anonymous web arena, you probably only think you know him. That’s because he treats Facebook as his own psychology lab; questioning, pushing, shocking and provoking to see what kind of reaction he can get. It can be alarming…if you don’t know Brett.

I’ve known him for almost 10 years now and I always enjoy getting together for a meal when I can catch up with him or on Skype for a podcast interview. We talked for almost 4 hours. Most of it after I shut down the recorder.

I still ended up cutting about 30 minutes out of our official podcast interview just to get it close to an hour.

If you’re a student of marketing and advertising, you’re gonna like this one. We compare and contrast the various strategies used by retailers and candidates. I was surprised, enlightened and entertained through the entire conversation and I hope you will be too.

What I left on the cutting room floor was mostly a conversation about Facebook that got a little personal for a few third parties. So, I decided not to share it.

We did cover campaign strategy, messaging, research, direct mail and the life of a political campaign staffer.

NOTE FROM DAVE:  The “SoundBites” podcasts are usually re-written in an article style (via Shortcut Blogging), but this one was such an interactive conversation that I decided to simply use the transcript. Enjoy the game!

So far…in these pre-game days, this is my fave: Beuller? Beuller?

Want to read the transcript?

Chris Loghry: Welcome to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young. Dave wants to talk Super Bowl. I didn’t know you were into football.

Dave Young: I’m not into football, Chris.

Chris: Oh, you’re into advertising.

Dave: Yeah, that’s right. [laughs] That’s right. Everybody gets focused on the Super Bowl ads every year, don’t they? I mean…

Chris: Oh, they do.

Dave: The die-hard sports fans, of course, want to watch the game. And there are some of us that would just rather see the ad reel at the end of it.

Chris: And there are a lot of people that just watch it for the ads. Of course, now with You Tube and other sources you don’t really have to sit through the whole thing, but…

Dave: That’s true. And sometimes those ads are released on YouTube even before the game.

Chris: So, what’s been your thoughts on Super Bowl advertising? I haven’t even looked to see what kind of rates they’re getting this year. It always seems to go up no matter what the audience, doesn’t it?

Dave: It really does, and last time I paid attention, wasn’t it about a million dollars a second, something like that?

Chris: Something like that. It’s, you know… it’s crazy expensive.

Dave: And, you know the big selling point is the huge reach…

Chris: The captive audience worldwide.

Dave: Yeah, it’s a gigantic audience. And so, if you remember conversations we’ve had about the advertising performance equation and reach versus frequency, what the Super Bowl offers is this huge, huge reach. And reach is just the number of people that an ad reaches. Frequency is how many you’re reaching and you measure frequency over, you know… yearly, weekly, monthly, whatever. And so when we buy radio, for example, our goal is to try to reach people three times in a week. And it usually takes 20 or 30 ads, depending on the station—sometimes more, sometimes less—to accomplish that.

Chris: Super Bowl advertisers aren’t getting much of that then, aren’t they?

Dave: No, no

Chris: With one ad.

Dave: For the most part, yeah. There may be a few companies that buy several ads.

Chris: True

Dave: But yeah, you’re getting a frequency of one with however many gazillion people you have. It’s extra large reach with minimal frequency. The only problem with it… it can be a good thing, depending on the business, right? So, if you’re a big brand that does business with people year-round, all the time, day in, day out, You’re Coca Cola. You’re Chevrolet. You’re just a giant corporation that it can be a good exposure for you, I guess is the thing. If you’re just trying to sell something… it can be a little weird and it can be strange to try to figure out if it’s a good buy or not.

Chris: It can all also backfire, can it not?

Dave: Well it can, because you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.

Chris: Right.

Dave: So if you’re a company that has to save up all year so you can buy your Super Bowl ad… I think it can be either a waste of money or really harmful to your business.

Chris: You would advise against it in most cases, I’m guessing.

Dave: In most cases, sure. And there are some companies that just have money to burn and they want to be on the Super Bowl and it’s important to them… I think of Go Daddy, for example. They always have some Super Bowl ad that’s just got racecar drivers and hot chicks in it.

Chris: Right. And you wonder, “What’s the point?”

Dave: Yeah, the funny thing is, they’re not relevant to the business they have.

Chris: Right

Dave: Right. They try to get you to their Web site and, “Hey, you’ll see more by going to our blog,” or whatever but they don’t talk about what it is the company does. So, strangely enough, if you remember some of those Super Bowl ads from before the dot-com bubble… do you remember that? When all these Internet companies…

Chris: Before the bubble burst?

Dave: Before the bubble burst, yeah. The Super Bowl was full of these bizarre ads from these companies that are no longer around.

Chris: I was just going to say… companies that don’t exist anymore. [laughs]

Dave: And it was just a monumental waste of money buying these ads because they weren’t relevant to what the company did. Go Daddy survived despite that because they offer a valuable service and they do it pretty well… they just have this bizarre kind of marketing concept that I’ve never quite figured out because it’s just not relevant to the services that they offer. They’re an Internet registrar and they offer [laughs] those kinds of services. They don’t have anything to do with racing. They don’t have anything to do with models. That seems to be…

Chris: And up to this point, it seems to work. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Dave: I don’t think they’re successful because they’re super bowl ads.

Chris: Okay.

Dave: I think they successful despite their super bowl ads. They’re spending money on Super Bowl because Bob Parsons wants to spend money on the Super Bowl. The owner of Go Daddy thinks it’s fun to spend money that way. And they’ve got loads of money.

Chris: Sure.

Dave: And that’s what they do with it. I don’t think the super bowl ads are driving business for them, but I couldn’t tell you…

Chris: What about recall? What about two months down the road when someone’s thinking, “I’ve got to register a domain name. How about that [laughs] what was it? Go Something?” Any of that?

Dave: I think you’re more likely to think, “Where can I find a video with Danica Patrick in it?”

Chris: You think it’s more of that?

Dave: Well, what else are you going to remember form those ads?

Chris: Well, that’s true

Dave: If they don’t talk about domain name registration, I guess they’re assuming that males are going to go there looking for more pictures of these girls and if they don’t know what Go Daddy is, come to the realization that, “Oh, Go Daddy is where I can register domain names.” And maybe some day they’re going to need to register a domain name. I don’t know. I think it’s a line item in Go Daddy’s marketing budget just called, “Ego.” And that’s… [laughs]

Chris: You and I are agreed that we don’t get it.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Okay.

Dave: I think an extra large reach is like, if you decided… here’s where it works, here’s where it doesn’t. If you go to Costco or Sam’s and you decide, “You know what, I’m going to finally buy all the cheese I’m ever going to eat. I’m going to do it all at once.” [laughs] Does that make sense? Does that seem like a good buy?

Chris: No, not at all.

Dave: It seems kind of stupid even saying it. It feels stupid to say it. Now if you have… there’s probably other products that you can say, “You know, I think that I’ve got this big garage and I don’t want to put anything else in it. Mice can’t get in it. Maybe I’ll buy all the toilet paper I think I’ll ever need in my life.” Maybe that’s a good idea. I don’t know if it’s a good use of space or not, but it’s certainly something you could do. It just doesn’t make sense to most people. And I think in advertising you have to do what makes sense, and in order to do what makes sense, you‘ve got to study it a little bit more than just saying, “Oh, the Super Bowl is here. They offered me an ad for X-million dollars.” Or, my local whatever just called me up and said, “Hey, we’ve got this magazine. Would you like to buy a full-page ad for X amount of dollars. It reaches this many people.” And if your budget… if you don’t take frequency into account, it may not be a good buy for you. You’re buying reach without thinking about the long-term consequences. You’re marketing plan should be as long as your business plan is. You should look forward in your marketing, just as long as you plan on being around.

Chris: Because there’s plenty of ways to throw your money away.

Dave: There’s plenty of them.

Chris: But you want to spend…

Dave: People are not going to endure all the time. You’ve got to think about your buying cycle. You’ve got to think about frequency, you’ve got to think about what your competitors are doing. And not just look at large reach, no matter how much it costs.

Chris: Who are you picking in the Super Bowl, then?

Dave: I don’t even know who’s playing.

Chris: [laughs]

Dave: I’ll probably watch some of the ads.

Chris: How about we’ll get back together after the Super Bowl and talk about what happened.

Dave: Sounds good.

Chris: Well, we can talk about the Super bowl ads, maybe. All right… thanks Dave. You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young. For more information visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this broadcast by sending the link or this mp3 to someone who can benefit from the information. And thank you for listing to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Dave Young.

Roy Williams has more to say on the subject of Reach and Gross Rating Points.

When you’ve got a writing mess (a dog’s breakfast, as my Aussie friends would call it) you need to call in an expert. Scribendi is to bad writing as Winston Wolf is to Jules and Vince.

Scribendi is a professional editing and proofreading company. I did some copywriting work for them a few years ago and reconnected with CEO Chandra Clarke for this podcast.

Chandra and I had a nice rolling conversation about how businesses can utilize her editing and proofreading services and why. I learned that her company has employees in every time zone on the planet and is available for projects 24/7, year round.

A couple of sites that I mentioned in the podcast were www.duhcorp.com and www.huhcorp.com which are fictitious companies on real websites with very creative tongue-in-cheek copy.

In case you’re wondering what kind of mess Vince and Jules have in their car… (If the bad words bother you, don’t play it. Seriously.)

This is age old advice in management circles.

Kinda funny how hard it is to do in practice. And it’s one of those topics where you look at business owners and managers and you think, “They really should take this advice.” I really want to talk about the “fire fast” but I’ll just touch briefly on the hire slow, because there are loads and loads of resources on how to hire people. Just remember that the worst thing you can do is hire the first person through the door that you think could probably learn to do the job.

The biggest pressure point on hiring somebody too fast is that often it’s the owner or manager that’s having to pick up the slack for not having someone there in the first place. So their goal is, “I need to get somebody in here so I don’t have to work as hard.” And yet, if you hire the first warm body that comes in the door, you can actually create bigger problems. Just Google “hire slow” and find some ways to hire better and hire more slowly and more deliberately. You’ll do a much better job of getting the right people in and you won’t have to fire as fast because you’ll have hired better.

The firing fast it’s really something that, if you’re not doing it, could really be a killer in your business. It can really damage things. Not only the way the customer perceives your business but the employees that work with them.

Just look at the different points of view.

From the manager: if you’re not firing fast, you’ve got somebody that’s just a drag on your time. You can’t get them to do what you want them to do. You can’t get them to do it well. You can’t get them to work well with other people.

From the co-workers’ point of view: keeping them is kind of a slap in the face because here you are paying this person that everybody knows shouldn’t be there, and you’re not paying as much attention to your good employees because the bad employee is taking up all your bandwidth. So the co-workers get upset.

You’re also damaging your reputation with your customers: we’ve talked about the Personal Experience Factor. A bad employee that is interacting with your customers is a recipe for disaster.

Finally the business owner perspective: it’s just a drain on profitability. You’re paying somebody that’s basically a cancer inside your organization.

The simple way to solve this is that if you want to improve morale, fire all the unhappy people.

That seems kind of glib and like it’s the punch line to a joke, but that’s really the core of it.

The unhappy people are going to fall into one of three camps. They’re either victims “Oh they just work us too hard, they expect too much of us.”

Or they’re non-believers. “Ah, I would never buy the car that we sell.” They don’t use your products. They don’t believe in the kinds of things that you’re doing in your business. So they’re just poisoning everybody. Again, they’re there for a paycheck.

Finally, the know-it-alls. These are the people that they’ve been around so long, “Oh, I’ll tell you why we can’t do it that way. You know, we tried that ten years ago, that’s not going to work.” That’s the know-it-all attitude. Those can sometimes be turned around, but usually they’re so set in their ways that they’re hard to turn around.

Last summer, a client of mine actually went through and got rid of the victims, the non-believers, and the know-it-alls. They got rid of all their unhappy people. They have three retail stores and they cleaned house of those people. Their sales for Christmas this year were up 24% over last year, unreal in a retail environment. I don’t know what the average was this year for Christmas versus the previous 12 months, but to be up 24% is pretty good. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to getting rid of the unhappy people. But the people that they kept sold a heck of a lot more, and their stores were just more fun to be around.

Your other employees will be so happy, so relieved to get rid of those victims, non-believers, and know-it-alls. They know those people have been dragging down the business.

Sometimes you may have to rely on co-workers. Meet with all of them, and they’ll all tell you who the victims, the non- believers, and the know-it-alls are. You won’t have too much trouble identifying the people that you need to let go if you ask all of your employees. The hard part about it is, from a manager or a business owner’s point of view, you want to be a caring boss. You want to be empathetic. You want to give people as many chances as they deserve. And I’m not saying don’t do that but, don’t do that. I am saying don’t do that!

Give them what they deserve, but don’t let them keep screwing up. You’re just messing up your business. You’re just destroying your reputation in the marketplace, with other employees, with your customers. You just can’t afford to do it. Fire fast. Hire slow. It’s been said a million times, but it’s never been more true and the beginning of the year is a good time to turn over a new leaf. Make that your New Year’s resolution. “We’re going to fire faster this year.”

Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link or the MP3 to someone who could benefit from the information.

BrandingBlog Soundbites are produced using the Shortcut Blogging method.

What really made this one fun is that we were face-to-face instead of on Skype. We were both in Palm Springs to have an annual meeting with a client that we’ve worked with almost as long as we’ve been Wizard of Ads partners. This past year our retail client grew 28% over the previous year. That’s a big deal any way you look at it.

In this rambling conversation, we discuss trends in societal change, sports (was it baseball or football?), politics and New Year’s Resolutions, or the lack thereof. You’ll learn about Michele’s F.A.R.E. mantra and my own twist on it.

I hope you enjoy it. I think I managed to maintain my family friendly rating on iTunes. Somehow, turning on the recorder kept us both from flinging f-bombs around the room.

This picture was from her Wonderbranding Class at Wizard Academy on Halloween, 2007. Yes, she taught the class dressed like this.

We chatted about 3 of his amazing creations. RealStatistics.com is an online graphing tool that lets you upload all of your business stats and helps you make sense of it all. If you need to keep your training ducks in a row, he’s also developed a platform called RethinkTraining.com for managing your company’s training materials while monitoring your trainees’ progress. Brilliant.

And, if you’re a local business that relies on brick & mortar sales, plus ecommerce, plus email marketing, plus putting your goods out there on Craigslist, all while keeping close tabs on what’s working and what’s not…his team co-developed GreySuitRetail.com. It’ll blow you away.

Raffy is truly one of the good guys on the internet. I met him when he was just starting to grow his empire. (This picture is a very young Raffy at Wizard Academy.)

At the end of the podcast, we talk a bit about Hana-Li, his very talented singer-songwriter wife. Check out Hana-Li on Facebook.

Since this is the first episode for 2012, we mostly talked about his plans for the new year and his renewed commitment to blogging. He is using the free outlining process that I produced for Shortcut Blogging. If you’d like to try it, just go to www.shortcutblogging.com/outline.

It may not sound like it in the podcast, but I got pretty excited when he talked about doing more free workshops this year in Australia. I may have to weasel my way onto his stage somehow. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been down under and I’m missing it.

Read more about Craig’s activities by following him on his Wizard Chronicles blog, on Facebook and on Twitter.

Thanks for coming along in our podcast journey!

The photo is Craig peeking out his room’s speakeasy window at Engelbrecht House on the Wizard Academy Campus.

Her site, Readerviews, offers a wealth of knowledge archived over years of helping authors. Her services are priced and sized just right for authors trying to break into a bigger pool of  exposure.

I first met Irene at Wizard Academy. She took the Blog and Web workshop from Paul Boomer and me several years ago.

I really had a good time catching up and learning about the many things she can do to help someone maximize the potential of their book.

For his friends who also happen to own businesses, he started putting a section at the end “For Business Owners Only.”

The December issue had a 12-page, single-spaced PDF attached to it full of Adrian’s best Year-End advice to business owners. As I skimmed and scanned it, I knew that this was information that would be helpful to a lot of my readers, so I got Adrian to join me for conversation and this podcast is the result.

If you’d simply like to get to know Adrian, you could bail out after 15 minutes or so when we start to get our hands dirty in the numbers.

If you’d like a copy of his checklist, go to Adrian Van Zelfden’s Facebook Page, Tidbits in Time and click on the “Join My List” link in the left column. He’s also given me permission to send it out, so if you join my list you’ll also get a copy. A third option is to go to vanzelfden.com and shoot him an email. You’ll get a good sense of his dry humor if you google the latin phrase in the header of that page.

So…how good is he?

In 30 years of helping clients with taxes and going with them to countless IRS audits, he’s often walked out with the IRS owing his clients money. More importantly, he’s never lost a dime of his client’s money in an audit. That is, his record is perfect. He’s never had a worse outcome than having the IRS say, “Yep, this tax return is just fine. No changes.” Damn. That’s good.

I like doing interviews that get me a bit out of my comfort zone. Finances, taxes, government…you get the idea. For an example, if you haven’t listened to my interview with Pamela Yellen, you missed out on her surefire way to grow your cash without exposing yourself to risk. And now, I hope you enjoy Adrian and that you find his timely advice worthwhile as you seek to keep more of that hard-earned money for yourself while staying out of trouble with the IRS.

Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog Soundbites, with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler, hello Dave.

Dave: Hi Adam

Adam: Dave, today were sitting down talking about measuring radio effectiveness on a website.

Dave: That seems like a crazy idea, doesn’t it?

How Do You Know If Your Radio Ads Are Working?

You’re running radio ads, and you’re trying to figure out if they’re working. One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is their desire for instant gratification. You want to know today whether those ads are working.

And actually measuring them on your website is one way to tell if they’re working today. You don’t really know when somebody’s need for your product or service popped into their mind. You don’t know what the driving factor was that made them decide that “hey, it’s time to call the HVAC Company,” or whatever your business provides.

But your website can give you a general idea of how well your unaided recall is working, and the way to do it is to identify those visitors as you’re looking at the sources of traffic on your website. Use a product like Google Analytics, which is free. If you don’t have it on your website, if you don’t have any kind of analytics, put Google Analytics on, or have your webmaster do it. It’s free, and it’s powerful, and it can answer some really interesting questions for you.

Which of Your Web Visitors Are The Result of Your Radio Ads?

You can divide your traffic up several different ways. First, look at organic search results, meaning how many people are searching for you and what words are they typing into the search engine to find you? Then there is direct traffic. These are visitors that are coming directly to your domain.

So, if I said, “check me out at shortcutblogging.com, and then somebody goes and clicks on their address bar and types shortcutblogging.com in there, they’re going to go direct to my website. They are not going to show up as an organic search with some kind of a keyword in Google. But it is going to be tracked. Google is going to say “Hey, here’s a visitor that went directly to the domain.”

But you could also go to Google and just type in the word “shortcutblogging” and search for me that way. Or you could type shortcutblogging.com into a search engine and get there that way. Any of those three ways and I’m going to know that you probably heard an ad somewhere or somebody told you about me, and that’s how you ended up on my website…because you searched for me by name.

Very few of us are going to search for a business by name, if we’ve never heard of them. So, if you’re an HVAC company in St. Louis, Missouri, and someone types in “air conditioner repair” in St. Louis, Missouri, it’s probably not the result of your radio ad, right? Because they’re not looking for you by name, they’re looking for anybody that can help them. Does that make sense?

So, as you divide up that traffic, just look at the keywords. If you’re Adam’s Air Conditioning in St. Louis, Missouri, then you look at anyone who typed in the word, “Adam” and air conditioning. They probably heard your radio ad, or they saw your newspaper ad, or their neighbor uses you, or whatever. But they knew about you, before they went to Google.

If Visitors Know The Name of Your Business, They Must Have Heard Of You

Somehow they heard of you. And if the only way that anybody’s talking about you is through paid ads, on the radio, or in the newspaper, or anywhere else, that’s an indication that those ads are working. If people are searching for you by name, and they have no other reason to, it’s a result of your ads. Have faith that that’s what’s happening. And if nobody’s searching for you by name, you probably don’t have a very effective schedule or a very effective message.

That’s how I do it for clients and I’ve got some clients with 60-70% of their traffic to their website is coming in by someone searching for them by name either by knowing their domain, by knowing the entire name of their business, or just some piece of it. I count all of those as success for the offline media campaign.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog’s SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young.  For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link, or the mp3 to some one who can benefit from the information. Thank you again for listening BrandingBlog Soundbites with Dave Young.

He’s been doing an awful lot of Magical Thinking lately. One of the more interesting examples involves tiger penis. Yep.

In addition to discussing feline phalluses (phalli?) I also got him to talk about how a business owner can use Magical Thinking to improve marketing, merchandising and the customer experience. That’s the practical application of Magical Thinking. Of course, if it’s phalli you want, go check out this guy.

One more thing….if you enjoy this podcast and get it on iTunes, it would be so cool if you could give it a rating and a comment. Thanks!

Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner, Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler. Hello, Dave.

Dave: Hi, Adam.

Adam: Today, we’re talking about Personal Experience Factor: the Approach. What do you mean?

Dave: Well, Personal Experience Factor, Adam, is the term that we use in the Advertising Performance Equation that relates to the actual experience that you’re delivering to a customer if you’re a brick and mortar retailer. If you don’t understand the advertising performance equation, you might not be familiar with this concept.

But, what we hold in this equation is that the actual in-store experience has a great deal of effect on how effectively your advertising dollars are being spent. It seems like a disconnect to most people because they think, “Oh, well the advertising should just be bringing people in the door.”

The real issue is the dollars that you’re spending on ads, if you’re doing it right, should have a long-term, lasting effect. It’s true, the dollars that you’re spending in advertising are responsible, in many cases, for getting people in the door the first time. Right? My first visit to your store may be as the result of your advertising. It could also be the result of a referral or a recommendation from a friend.

Whatever it is that got me in your door the first time, it worked, right? I came in the door, I crossed your threshold the first time, and I’m there. All right. So, what gets me in the second time?

It’s the experience that I had the first time!

Adam: Right, exactly. When you walk in that door, that feeling you get and the experience, that will keep you coming back.

Dave: Exactly. So, if they drop the ball there, what happens is they miss out on one of the most powerful things that they can do in advertising, which is to generate a feedback loop of referral business. If you get people in the door and you give them a good experience, you ignite this little fire that says, “Hey, when I go out and somebody needs your product, I’m going to recommend you because I had a good experience there.”

That’s the kind of a feedback loop that feeds back into share of voice and share of mind, which are other parts of the Advertising Performance Equation. We’ll talk about that another time.

When I talk about the Personal Experience Factor and the approach, we could do a weekly podcast and never talk about anything besides Personal Experience Factor if we want to talk about all the different things that make up someone’s experience in your store. We could talk about hiring, we could talk about merchandising, and decor, and design, and product mixes and pricing, and all those things that happen inside the doors.

What I wanted to do in this episode was just drill down on what I call the approach. That is to look at your business through the eyes of someone that’s approaching it for the first time. So, I’m not even in the door yet. I’m a block away. Can I see it? Is your sign readable? Is your location decent?

As I get closer and closer, is your paint peeling, or does it look good? Are your windows clean, or are they dirty and smudgy? Is the sidewalk swept off or is it covered in dust and gravel? Those kinds of issues all have to do with the approach, and it’s that whole concept of “you only have one chance to make a first impression.”

You need to start with Personal Experience Factor by taking a step away from your business and looking at it from a distance.

I like to use the metaphor of an airliner coming in for a landing at an airport. They have to be able to see that runway from a long ways off. That’s why runways are all marked consistently. If you’re a pilot, you know a runway when you see it. If you’re landing at night, the lights have to be just right. Everything has to work just right. This is before we ever get to the gate, right?

Before the wheels touch down, everything has to look good. Then, when you do touchdown – if you’ve ever landed at JFK, I landed at JFK one time and the flight attendant, I think this was on JetBlue Airlines, the flight attendant said, “Well, as you can tell by the potholes in the runway, welcome to JFK.” That’s the experience you get when you land at JFK. It’s not a great one, but you know you’re there. So, we haven’t even got to the gate yet.

You need to make sure that the approach…that everything is clear, marked, easy to find, welcoming… parking is ample, spacious. The parking lot’s not full of cigarette butts and soda cups. It’s paying attention to those details from the outside in. If, as a business owner, you’ve become blind to those things, which often happens. Adam, what happens is we walk in those doors every single day. The first time you notice some paint peeling you go, “Oh, yeah. Someday I’m going to have to repaint this building.” You forget about it, and pretty soon it just becomes invisible to you. But, the person that’s coming in for the very first time notices those things.

So, what I like to recommend is that as a business owner, find somebody else’s eyes to look at it. If you don’t have a way to ask real customers about it, then get somebody. Probably a spouse isn’t the best, because a spouse is going to be suffering from the same “inside the bottle” view that you do.

Get a friend or a friend’s spouse and say, “Hey, I need you to come to the store and I need you to stop a block or two out. As soon as you know you can see the place, stop and take a few notes. What could we do better? How could our sign be better? What do you see? What do you notice? Then get a little closer, maybe half a block away. Then, as you get within shouting distance, same thing. Make notes about what you see on the sidewalk, what you see in the door, all those things.”

So, everything from the outside to the threshold is the approach. If you can get somebody to take some notes and make some suggestions, you’ll probably find half a dozen things that you can do to improve the approach and not spend a whole lot of money. Guess what? It’s going to make your ad budget work better. It will make your radio ads work better, it will make your newspaper ads work better because it will help you from short-circuiting that feedback loop that is generated by word-of-mouth and referrals. All these little things just add up to something big.

Adam: Right, and especially in person. People are going to hear about a negative comment tenfold over a good experience.

Dave: Absolutely. We’re all more inclined to repeat something bad that happened to us than something good. So, you’ve got to just eliminate any possibility of someone having a bad experience, even if it’s something as seemingly insignificant as dirty windows in your storefront.

Now, if you have a service company, if you’re an HVAC company or a roofing company, and you’ve got vehicles out around town and nobody comes to your location much, pay attention the same way. Can I read the signs on your van from a block away, from a half block away?

I had a client who had some of those wraps, basically, on the sides of his van windows. They were in a color that if the sun was at the wrong angle, you really couldn’t tell that it had anything on it at all. So, that’s a problem. Make sure that it’s high contrast, high visibility. People need to see that. People need to know that you’re pros and that you are what you say you are in your ads. There you are, there’s your van, and it looks good. It makes a difference, it really does.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner, Dave Young. For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link or the MP3 to someone who could benefit from the information.

Thank you again for listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Dave Young.

This is Mistake #9 of the 12 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising, as presented in On Your Market.

Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler. Hello Dave.

Dave: Hi, how you doing Adam?

Adam: Doing well, how about yourself?

Dave: Great, thanks.

Adam: All right. The last time we were still on the biggest mistakes of the twelve. And we’re on number nine now. Great Production that Misses the Mark. What is number nine, Dave?

Dave: Well, great productions that misses the mark. You know we’ve all seen ads, and we go wow, that was really cool, that was really funny, humorous, whatever. But, what was it trying to get me to do, what product was it representing?

In a simple way, that’s really what we’re talking about, is an ad that you go “wow, that was really cool”, and you can’t name the product. You can’t remember anything. It just made you laugh; it was interesting it was well done. Right? So sometimes, that seems to be the bar that advertiser reach for, and then they scratch their heads and wonder, why their ad budgets’ not working, very well. Does that make sense?

Adam: Yeah, it certainly does. It’s one thing to get people talking. It’s another thing to have them remembering what they’re talking about.

Dave: Exactly, so there’s this story from 1967. Are you familiar with who Stan Freberg is?

Adam: I’ve heard the name.

Dave: He was a big radio guy, he’s the guy who started in the ‘80’s with the concept of radio is the theater of the mind. So, some people might remember, I mean radio stations all over the country, used to play this industry promotional ad about turning lake Michigan into a giant lake of hot chocolate. And the Air Force, flying over dropping marshmallows in, and you know, all of this stuff.

So his point was, that using radio, you can do things that you couldn’t actually do in physical reality. You can create things, and you can do it on a really low budget. If you wanted to make a TV commercial, like that you just couldn’t do it. Nobody could afford to do that. And that was before the days of, CGI. So still that was a problem. And Stan Freberg’s a very creative guy, as far as doing these campaigns that are just kind of over the top.

And in 1967, this is one of his deals. Pacific Airlines, which was a little commuter airline, on the west coast. They hired Stan Freberg, to design an unorthodox campaign. What he suggested was that Pacific Airlines, poke fun at the one thing airlines never mention, which is fear of flying.

So, at Freberg’s direction, Pacific Airlines placed full-page ads in newspapers. And this is verbatim, the copy that was in these ads. It said, “Hey there, you with the sweat in your palms. It’s about time an airline faced up to something. Most people are scared witless of flying, deep down inside, every time that big plane, lifts off that runway, you wonder if this is it, right? You want to know something fellow? So does the pilot, deep down inside.”

I mean can you imagine reading that, and going, oh, my gosh. I don’t think, well I would hope that pilots, don’t have that feeling, deep down inside, right? That’s what they’re known for, is their confidence. And that’s not the message you want to convey to the public, about your pilots, or your airline, so. He didn’t end there; this was a campaign that they took all the way, through to the customer experience, inside the airplane. So he also arranged for flight attendants, to hand out survival kits, which had rabbit’s feet in them.

And they passed out the book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” And when the plane touched down, the flight attendants were supposed to shout, “We made it, how about that!” The airline went under, two months after the campaign started. So, it was a really, clever, creative campaign. Well executed, well done, and it killed the business. And it only took them two months to do it. They were deeply committed to their creativity, to their message, but it was absolutely the wrong message. It was well executed, it was a well-produced plan and it ended up giving people no confidence whatsoever in the company.

So that airline went under in 1967. Stan Freberg, I think he’s even still around. So the point there is it’s ultimately the business owner’s responsibility to make sure that the message, the core values, even if you have a consultant, or an agency…that those core values are being communicated, in a way which meets the customer’s felt need. Not just accomplishing something that’s clever, funny, and creative, and different.

So your goals, instead of being clever, funny, creative, and different, should be informative, believable, memorable, and persuasive. Those are the things that you should be after. So, when we talk about Great Production that Misses the Mark, that’s what we’re talking about. You can go over the top, and make really cool sounding, really cool reading, funky messages, but convince people, to do the exact thing that you don’t want them to do, which is, not do business with you.

Adam: Right, it only took a few months to totally miss the mark, and a company, went right out of business.

Dave: Yeah, so you’ve got to be careful with that. You’ve got to make sure that the messages are targeted in the right direction. So, that’s the biggest mistake number nine. Great Production that Misses the Mark.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites, with Wizard Of Ads partner Dave Young. For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast, by sending the link or the mp3 with someone, who can benefit from the information.

Thank you again for listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites, with Dave Young.

This podcast and blog post were created using the ShortcutBlogging method.

Mark and I helped teach a book writing workshop several years ago with an all-star cast led by Mike Drew.

We talk about PR, Brain nutrients, Amazon, Sean Phillip’s Full Strength shakes, and loads of other crazy stuff, including the time that Mark overdosed Rich Christiansen with niacin. It’s basically unedited and rambling and just soooo Effinger.

This is the kind of conversation that I love having with Mark. We’ve had so many of these, and this is the first I recorded for a podcast. I know there will be more. Effing Effinger.

Chris: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Chris Loghry. Hello Dave.

Dave: Hi Chris.

Chris: We wanted to talk about Impact Quotient. I would like to start by asking you what that means to a client.

Dave: Well, simply put, Impact Quotient is an ad’s power to convince. There are strong ads and weak ads, and most businesses really don’t think all that much about whether or not their ad is carrying the weight that it should be based on their budget. If two businesses have identical budgets and spend it on the exact same schedules on a radio station, for example, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to have the exact same results because the Impact Quotient of an ad can leverage a schedule to outperform an identical schedule.

Basically, it can turn a smaller ad budget into a larger share of mind by leveraging a more convincing ad than your competitors. You can literally get double the results of a budget by having a really strong, really powerful ad. It doesn’t really cost that much to do a better ad than a mediocre ad. That’s the really surprising part.

Chris: And maybe you said this, but are we talking specifically about the ad copy, the theme of the advertising campaign?

Dave: The really important thing when you’re writing an ad for a business is to find something to say that is powerful enough that you can make a powerful ad about it. Most businesses just want to write we have fast, friendly service and we’ve been here since 1952.

Chris: Family owned and operated.

Dave: For all your “fill in the blank” needs.

Chris: And prices. Prices seem to always find their way into it.

Dave: They think that everybody wants to hear what every little thing is going to cost when they come in. In reality, what you really want is a powerful offer. That goes deeper than just writing a powerful ad. It digs into the strategy of the business itself. If your business hasn’t thought through how you’re going to stand out from your competitors, it makes it really tough for an ad writer and you end up with mediocre ads.

Chris: And when you say a powerful offer, you’re not just talking about this weekend’s sale. You’re talking about what your business has to offer a customer.

Dave: Exactly. There a chain, I guess it’s a franchise of heating and air conditioning companies, and our Wizard of Ads Partner, Roy Williams, put together the strategy for them and the messaging. They’re called One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning.

They could just run an ad that talks about how they’re a heating and air conditioning company and they’ll take care of you and come out and fix your air conditioner when it breaks and fix your heater when it’s not working, just like all the other HVAC companies. These guys invested in a business model that says, “Look, if we’re not there when we say we’re going to be there, you don’t pay for our call. You don’t pay for anything that you need.”

That takes some strategy back in the operations of the business. These guys not only have to deliver what they say on their message, they have to figure out how they’re going to deliver it. It’s a little bit deeper than just the message on the face of it on their ads, because the ads say if we’re not on time, you don’t pay a dime.

They put systems in place that allow them to follow up on that promise. It’s worked like gangbusters for them. They’ve had something to say that other HVAC companies just can’t do. They can’t match it because they don’t understand that there’s also a system behind it. But it makes for a very, very powerful ad. A high Impact Quotient.

Chris: I think one of the most interesting things is the first time I’ve heard the name of the business, when you just said it, and that’s the first thing that popped into my mind, One Hour Heating and Air. There it is right there. That’s going to appeal to a lot of people, but then like you said, they have to have the business model and everything in place to back that up.

Dave: Exactly. The powerful thing about that Chris is that that business concept resonates in so many of our minds because it brings to mind, it pulls right back to the center of our brain where we remember having experiences where we’re sitting around our house waiting for the cable guy to show up, waiting for the plumber to show up, waiting for the air conditioning guy to show up, waiting for the phone company guy to show up. All they’ll ever say to us is we’ll be there between 8:00 a.m. and noon.

Chris: I just went through that just recently. It’s so true, because we were told 1:00 to 3:00 and I think it was 3:30 or 3:45 when they actually made it, so it’s always a challenge.

Dave: Here’s a company that says, “Hey if we say we’re going to be there at 2:00, if we’re late and we were coming to install a new air conditioner, then we’re going to give it to you free. We’re that confident in what we’re doing.” They have systems for it, and to be honest, they actually charge a little bit more for that kind of service.

You can call this same company and say well I’m here all day so you can be here between 9 and noon, and they’ll say, “Okay that’s cool too because our hourly rate is a little bit less if you give us that kind of leeway. We don’t have to schedule as tightly.” They do have that as part of the system.

Chris: The customer pays for that premium.

Dave: You pay for that premium because that’s what you want to do. There are plenty of people that are willing to do that, and there are people that aren’t that are home all day. They basically offer the best of both worlds, whichever you want.

Chris: Obviously, that strategy is not going to work for every company. How does a company decide what it is that does work for them? How do they get that kind of a reaction?

Dave: Well, it just depends on the company. It depends on so many factors. You have to take into account the product that you’re selling or service that you’re providing, what the buying cycle is, and most importantly where you’re at in the mix of your competitors.

You have to find those strategies in order to stand out, but you do it based on analyzing what everybody else is doing and try to figure out how are we going to be different and how are we going to be more valuable? What can we add to the equation that’s going to make us stand out?

That gives us something we can talk about and that can make all the difference. If you don’t have that, if you’re just selling something that is the same that you’re going to get in any other store that carries that, a good example would be any kind of a brand name product. If you’re talking about a Rolex watch for example.

I’ll end today with one of Roy H. Williams, probably one of his most famous ads, because it’s one that he uses in presentations, it’s one that we’ve used in seminars. This is the kind of ad that you would write to create a powerful message around something that’s going to be the same no matter where you buy it, and that’s a Rolex watch. It doesn’t matter where you buy your Rolex watch, you’re getting a Rolex watch. It’s going to be the same. The store you buy it in doesn’t really make that much of a difference, and you’re going to pay the same for it really no matter where you buy it. You have to come up with something that’s powerful and puts the listener into the ad the way your competitors aren’t doing.

Chris: They’re going to feel some emotion or some connection to your particular store.

Dave: Exactly. Let me read this ad to you.

“You’re standing in the snow five and a half miles above sea level gazing at a horizon hundreds of miles away. Life here is serious. You live or you die. No whining, no second chances, no compromises. This is a place constantly ravaged by wind and snow, where every ragged breath is an accomplishment. You stand on the upper most pinnacle of the Earth. This is the mountain called Everest. Yesterday it was considered unbeatable, but that was yesterday. As Edmond Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak of Mount Everest, he monitored the time on a wristwatch specifically designed to withstand the fury of the world’s most angry mountain. Rolex believed Sir Edmond would conquer Everest, and especially for him they created the Rolex Explorer. In every life there’s an Everest to be conquered. When you’ve conquered yours you’ll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come pick it up at Young Jewelers. I’m Dave Young and I’ve got a Rolex for you.”

What happens in 60 seconds, Chris, using verbs, active voice, audacity, and really strong first and last mental images in that ad, we actually transferred ownership of that watch to you. That’s a powerful ad. If we just ran price and item on Rolex, that would be pretty weak.

Chris: It gets someone to start thinking about how will that affect me? A relationship between them and the watch almost.

Dave: You actually have to put the listener into the ad. If you can do that or create a strategy that you can talk about that’s more powerful than your competitors, either one of those is a good way to affect a higher Impact Quotient in your ads.

Chris: Some people are going to be able to come up with original ads with creative things, but maybe not the whole concept, like what we’ve been talking about, the Impact Quotient. How can they get more help doing that to make their business stand out from all the rest?

Dave: They can contact me. I can do consulting. That’s what I do for a living is consult with owner operated businesses about exactly these kinds of things. I’ve also got some training programs that people could take a look at if they want to try to do it and become better at writing these kinds of ads on their own.

Chris: Okay. We’ll share some more thoughts on BrandingBlog SoundBites with Dave Young. Thanks for joining us, Dave.

Dave: Thank you, Chris.

You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner Dave Young. For more information, visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link or the MP3 to someone who could benefit from the information. Thank you for listening to Branding Blog Sound Bites with Dave Young.

On the podcast this week, we discuss the chicken and egg scenario of customer experience vs strategy and core values. Which should you focus on first?

Tom is one of those guys who I’m always having interesting conversations with about marketing, branding and strategy. This time, I had the recorder running and you get to listen in.

Chris: Welcome to BrandingBlog SoundBites. I’m Chris Loghry along with Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com and a Wizard of Ads Partner. We’ve talked about several things. We’ve included the Ad Budget Calculator in a couple of the podcasts. You can always go back to that and check that out online. There’s a link to that on the podcast. Today we want to touch on the topic of the power of personal experience. Hello Dave.

Dave: Hi Chris. Personal experience, it’s a big deal in any retail store.

Chris: Now are we talking about the customer? Are you talking about the retailer themselves? Which angle are we taking here?

Dave: Well, I’m talking about the customer, the experience that you get when you walk in the door of a business.

Chris: The basic experience of being a shopper going into a store and how they like it, how they don’t?

Dave: Most people don’t understand how that interplays with their ad budget and how their ads are working, whether they’re performing really well. Have you ever given that any thought?

Chris: I can’t say that I have. You mentioned that in a previous podcast that you consider the store, the location part of their ad budget, and that’s an interesting way to look at it.

Dave: One of these times we’re going to talk about the Advertising Performance Equation. The Personal Experience Factor is one of two big levers that can increase the performance of an ad budget. One of them, and we’ve mentioned it before, is the Impact Quotient. The Impact Quotient is the ad’s ability to convince or to get people to act, and the other one is the personal experience factor. The really key part of the Personal Experience Factor is that it feeds back into this performance equation as kind of a feedback loop in the form of word of mouth. If I go into Joe’s Paint Store and Joe’s Paint Store is exactly what I expected it to be, there’s row after row of cans of paint …

Chris: And brushes.

Dave: … and brushes and tarps and supplies. There’s Joe standing behind the counter, and he says, “Hey, how are you doing?” I say, “Great, looking for some paint.” I get exactly the experience that I was expecting, but it’s not any better and it’s not any worse than I was expecting. It’s just perfectly neutral. It really doesn’t have much effect at all on whether your ad budget and everything else is working well. Expectations were met. I wasn’t disappointed, but neither was I thrilled. It’s just neutral. It just passes right through.

Chris: Kind of a gray area.

Dave: It’s kind of like just filling your car up with regular gasoline. It runs. It runs just like you expected it to run. No better, no worse. Your experience is neutral. If you took the same car and dumped really bad gas in it, maybe you aren’t supposed to use E85 and you put that in your car.

Chris: Not a good idea.

Dave: Not a good idea. It’s not going to run very well is it?

Chris: Right.

Dave: Your experience is going to less than you expected. The performance of your car is not going to be up to par. The same thing if you put high octane and then somebody, while you weren’t looking, put a nitrous injector under the hood, your experience in driving that car is going to be way more than you expected.

Chris: You kind of go back to what we’ve talked about in previous podcasts. You figured your ad budget. You decided where to put those dollars to maximize your advertising, and then you get customers into the store and they’re terribly disappointed.

Dave: You’ve just wasted your ad budget.

Chris: I was trying to think of a way of saying that without saying it, but that’s the truth, all that work for naught.

Dave: Exactly. What’s amazing is people don’t put two and two together. They think that the ad budget’s job is to get people through the door period. Not all your traffic is coming from your ad budget. A lot of your traffic in any business is coming from referrals. It’s coming from whether you did a remarkable enough job or you had a remarkable enough store or remarkable enough food at your restaurant for your customers to actually recommend you to somebody else.

Chris: Do you find that business owners stop to think about that themselves, is what makes me go back to a particular store or a particular business? Why do I do that and how can I turn that into what people experience in my business?

Dave: Most of them are too busy putting out fires to stop and think about that.

Chris: That would’ve been my guess.

Dave: And that there are some actual ways to improve those things. All you have to do is be better than your competitors. You don’t have to be a whole lot better. You just have to be slightly better. One of the things I tell people to do is go into your competitors’ shops or have a spouse or a friend, if you’re worried about your competitor thinking that you’re in there spying on him, you’re going to spy on them anyway, you’re just not going to do it yourself, but go in and rate them.

A simple way to do it, and I have a little handout that I give people if they subscribe to my email list, and there’s a little form right on the side of Branding Blog, but I’ll send this to you. It’s five senses, basically a little survey. You go into a competitor’s store and rate the store based on your five senses. Does it smell okay? Does it smell good or bad or is it neutral?

What does it look like from the street? What does it look like inside? Is it painted well? Are the carpets worn? Those kinds of things. Look around with your eyes and decide does this have a pleasing look to it.

Chris: Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com and Wizard of Ads Partner. Dave, thanks for joining us.

Dave: Thank you Chris.

You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner Dave Young. For more information, visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link or the MP3 to someone who could benefit from the information. Thank you for listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Dave Young.

This podcast and blog post were produced via ShortcutBlogging.com

Turns out Joe spent the last days of the Cold War chasing Soviet agents across Europe. He was in Berlin when the wall came down. When I mentioned that his resume read like a character in a Tom Clancy novel, he said, “funny you should mention that,” and proceeded to tell the story of how his unit was involved in Clancy’s research for Clear and Present Danger. Wow. He ended his military career in a comfortable assignment in a castle in Verona, Italy, during the Bosnian war. A fitting reward for years of service.

He came home and put in 12 years in his dad’s landscape architecture company. About 18 months ago, Joe started a new business focusing on government contracting and helping returning veterans find jobs and start businesses. It’s called Frontline Support Solutions and he’s already growing and helping our veterans. Joe is also on the board of directors of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

On this Veteran’s Day, it was an honor and a pleasure to spend an hour with former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, Jose M Perez. I hope you enjoy the interview.