(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show.
Each week, we talk about the growth strategies
that matter most to entrepreneurs.
Listen in as we discuss the secrets to
getting credit and money to start and grow
your business.
And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business
owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety
of topics from advertising and marketing to the
nuts and bolts of running a highly successful
business.
And now, to introduce the host of our
show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty
Crandall.
Hello, and thanks for joining us today.
I'm super excited you could be here.
Look, today, let's grow your business.
Let's really do what's needed to be able
to help your business grow, to help your
business scale.
That's one of the biggest problems I find
with business owners.
A lot of them are getting business from
referrals or unpredictable sources instead of creating a
predictable way to bring revenue in the door
to actually scale the company.
And today, we're just gonna simply solve that
problem and be able to do it.
We brought the foremost expert in here on
digital marketing, Bob McIntosh.
Now, Bob is actually a digital marketing strategist.
He's a speaker, he's also an educator, and
he helps businesses grow by building audiences online.
So he's been doing this since 2020.
And digital marketing has become the fastest and
most powerful way for companies to be able
to capture attention and to be able to
communicate value and create basically lasting communities where
people will continue to buy from you again
and again.
And Bob has been leading in this space
now for over 12 years.
So with more than 4,000 hours on
stage and experience helping tens of thousands of
businesses, he brings real world insight across a
lot of different industries from like consumer goods,
electronics coaching, industrial B2B, even local markets as
well.
So what I love about Bob is that
he believes that no matter the business model,
winning today requires attention, it requires trust, it
requires connection, which is 100% accurate the
same way I see it as well.
And online platforms make the most accessible way
to be able to do this than ever.
And that's where Bob really specializes.
So through practical strategies, proven frameworks, he empowers
business owners to grow their influence, to increase
the demand and thrive in the modern economy,
especially even in a world of AI.
Bob, what's up, man?
Thanks for joining me today.
Thanks so much for having me, man.
I'm here and looking forward to it, excited.
If you're listening, I just wanna say real
quick, thank you for the time and attention
to this podcast.
I don't take it lightly that you're coming
here to learn and I hope I'm gonna
deliver some great value for you over the
next several minutes here.
Yeah, no, you will, man.
You do some great stuff.
I love what you're doing online.
You've gained a big following and really gained
the reputation you have.
I mean, speaking to so many people, helping
so many business owners.
So what have you found?
Because it's interesting in digital marketing, I find
there's coaches, there's agencies out there, but there's
only a few, a very small percentage of
you guys that really can help take a
business to the next level.
So what is it that you do that's
so unique that's helped you just grow this
business the way that you've grown it?
That's a great question.
So the way that we work and the
successes that we've had so far, really focused
around a couple of key areas.
And the first is ironically the most important,
whether you're working with me or any agency
or anyone like bringing in house as a
marketing person in house too, right?
Which is as the business owner, there's several
things required for you to scale up from
a marketing perspective.
First is being willing to risk it.
I can't tell you how many times people
come in and they're like, well, yeah, I'll
spend as much money as you want as
long as it's profitable.
Well, yeah, of course, everyone will do that.
Like, let's be real, like that's what everyone
wants, but it's not always how it works
at the beginning, right?
Marketing is a gamble.
We roll the dice and we figure some
things out.
We figure out what worked, what didn't, and
then we go further.
And so the first key component is an
owner whose understanding of the process, the time
it will take to really find a winner
and willing to risk what they've got, what
they've gotten, which is usually money and time
to start with, right?
On the idea that this could work more.
So that's number one.
And just be open to the process.
Well, like I said, a lot of folks
come in and they have an expectation of,
I hire an agency, they're an agency, they
know everything, they'll figure it out and they'll
hit a home run every time.
And it's not about hitting a home run
every time.
In fact, I can probably count on one
hand the number of times I've hit a
home run the first time.
It's usually the second, third, fourth, fifth iteration
of working through and figuring out what didn't
work, what piece did, and then combining those
into something that, an offer that actually strikes
gold and makes it work.
So that's number one.
Number two is someone who actually understands what
it's like to be a business owner and
work in your industry, your niche, or at
the very least, someone who understands what it's
like to operate a business.
Now, most agency owners, they're all business owners,
but transparently, a lot of them, and this
is not to say that these folks don't
have some value, but a lot of them
are 25 year old, younger, like this is
the first time they're doing something.
And yes, they have knowledge and information and
they're hungry and they're go-getters, but they
don't necessarily have a depth of experience.
So my agency has only been around since
2020.
However, I started doing marketing in my own
business as a real estate investor, flipping houses
back in 2008.
So even though as an agency, we're fairly
young, as a business owner, I've got almost
20 years of trying to figure out how
marketing works for different companies, both my real
estate business, and then I actually also worked
with an education company, selling coaching in the
space, and then transitioned to that into an
events business and now into an agency, right?
So it kind of like stacked from there.
And so having those two combinations together allows
me the freedom to do what I need
to, because you're open minded to growing something
and not just saying, well, I want it
to work the way it's always worked.
Well, if it was working the way it
always worked, you wouldn't probably be talking to
me and someone who's got some knowledge to
build upon what you're doing.
So those two things really help create success.
But when you think, we used to have
people that are trying to get into this,
because I'm sure you see what I see.
I mean, most entrepreneurs out there are just
unpredictable.
They just don't have predictability to what they're
doing because they're not doing anything predictable, right?
They're getting money from, getting leads from referrals
everywhere else.
So when you see somebody jump in initially,
like what are some of the first steps
somebody should take to get into digital marketing?
Like what should they be doing?
What should they have ready before they get
to you?
Kind of give me a breakdown.
Yeah, so the core pillars, every business needs,
no matter what level of marketing you wanna
play at, you have to have these things.
And if you don't, will it work without
them?
Yes, it'll just be either unpredictable, it will
be not work as well as it should,
or outright fail.
So there's a few pillars.
The first is you've gotta have a great
website.
And I know everyone says, oh yeah, yeah,
yeah, right?
But I don't mean a Wix website that
you paid for for free, that you spent
the weekend building and it looks like a
12 year old built it, right?
If you are running a business and you
wanna scale, go invest in a proper website.
And that's not gonna cost you tens of
thousands of dollars.
Most cases you're between two and maybe $8
,000 to have a really good website built
for you.
And I don't mean an AI one.
Yes, AI tools are out there and they
can build websites.
So far, every single one of them I
see is just the same block formation of
the same eight things, which is fine, right?
It's better than nothing, but invest in having
a good website.
Because the moment that someone comes to your
website is how they judge your credibility.
You could be the best business in what
you do, but if your website looks like
it's dated, it's old, it's unreliable, or it
was built on Wix, which people know is
a free tool, they immediately assume that you're
cheap and your business is cheap and your
service is cheap, even if it's not true,
right?
Because it's all about that.
So that's number one.
Number two is you've got to really have
the right CRM behind you for communication and
customer flow.
Spreadsheets just simply don't cut it today.
People want to be able to reach you
wherever they want to talk to you, not
where you want to talk to them.
So if they want to text, they want
a message on Facebook, they want to message
you on Instagram, they want to email you,
they want a live chat on your website,
you've got to have all of these things
available.
Your CRM is going to take all of
the various communication channels, everything that exists, a
good one though at least, and funnel it
into a single place so that you don't
have to be on all those platforms, but
you can be connected to all those platforms
and still communicate with them how they need
to, particularly if you're a newer business, right?
Or if you're in a business that historically
is more of a service type business that's
more old school, I'll consider, for example, any
trades, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, those kinds of businesses,
for example.
A lot of the contractors too, a lot
of those are older school businesses.
And as the younger generation, the younger millennials,
and even the older Gen Z start to
become customers of all of our businesses, they
don't want to work with old school.
They want to work with digitally forward companies.
So your CRM combined with your website is
going to create two pillars for you to
build success.
And then the last pillar is, you have
to just be out there doing things like
this, podcasts, and what I mean by that
is, not necessarily you need to go host
a podcast, you need to be the founder
of all these things, but get your name
out there, go to events, go to podcasts,
be on shows, talk to people, be visible
so that when folks search for your company,
your company's name, there's a higher probability if
you're not actively doing SEO to get ranked
on Google, there's still a higher probability that
they'll come, they'll find you, they'll find your
great website, and they'll be able to communicate
with you.
So if we combine those three things together,
it's how you begin to win on the
digital landscape.
Now, there's a hundred more things you could
be doing, but if you're like, hey, I'm
just getting going, I'm not like generating massive
leads online, you got to start there.
Now, the other fun thing is that those
three things combined will actually drive down the
cost of almost every other digital marketing format
that exists.
And so when you do those three things
well, everything else becomes easier, cheaper, and faster.
I love it.
And that's a strong three pillar foundation that
I agree.
I mean, there's just no reason you can't
generate leads if you're not doing those three
things.
So if you have those three things in
place, like what does digital marketing look like?
What kind of advertising is involved in digital
marketing?
Yeah, so the next step is gonna really
be budget dependent, but for most businesses, paid
ads is your next play.
And we can sit here and debate the
merits of paid ads all day.
And I'll be the first to tell you,
I hate giving my money to Facebook and
Google and all these other companies just to
try to generate business.
But the reality is Google and Meta, I'll
include Facebook and Instagram as that, and TikTok,
for example, those three channels still today control
almost 65% of all marketing that's being
done.
Like, it's just, and if we advance that
to, or segment that down rather to include
just like physical products that you're selling or
services, the number's even higher.
Now, I'm leaving Amazon outside there, because even
though, yes, Amazon is a marketing platform, we
can do ads on there.
It's a little bit of a different beast
for most of us in that capacity.
But the reality is we can play there.
And the other reality is that if you
find someone who understands how to run ads
for you in the right way, it becomes
a very predictable and scalable model.
I know for every dollar I put in,
I'm getting three, five, eight, $10 back out.
As long as that math works for my
business, then every dollar I increase, I make
that much more back.
Now, it doesn't always scale one-to-one,
of course, right?
There's gonna be variables and there's gonna be
ups and downs.
But over the long haul, if you look
at it, it becomes a very predictable source
of revenue.
And because of that, now I can scale
and I can start to plan and I
can go out and say, okay, I know
if I have X, I can do Y.
Maybe I need to get a loan to
do more.
Or maybe I wanna reinvest some of my
capital.
I'm not gonna pay myself this month.
Instead, I'm gonna take that, put it over
here because I know that for every dollar
in, I'm getting $3 out or whatever the
number might be for your business, right?
That's where most people move to next.
And then for most folks, SEO is the
next step after that.
Pros and cons, I have very strong opinions
that SEO should probably take place sooner.
SEO, for those of you who don't know,
is search engine optimization, which is also wrapped
into now what we call generative engine optimization
or AI engine optimization.
There's different terms for it.
But basically, how do you show up on
Google, Yahoo, Bing?
How do you show up on ChatGPT, Cloud,
Gemini, all those tools, right?
More and more, that's becoming important.
The problem with that is that it takes
time and the investment into that usually won't
be seen for months, so months down the
road.
And so for most businesses, while it is
important to do, it's usually something you're not
gonna do until you've got some more predictable
income and you can siphon some of that
into something that may not get you leads
and generate revenue today, but might in six,
12, 18, 24 months from now.
Yeah, I love the strategy.
I mean, you gotta have a short play
and a long play, and the short play
generates the revenue to pay for the long
play.
And to your point, I know you, like
me probably, like I'm making more and more
decisions where ChatGPT's decided what I buy.
I mean, it just is.
Like I just bought an LED, like red
light therapy, and it completely redirected me from
where I was thinking about going.
I had the company, I had the device,
and it completely redirected me to a different
company and a different device.
I just think that's the future.
So I think you have to be thinking
both ways.
What can bring money in the door now?
And what should you be working on that's
the longer play?
Because otherwise, your competition's gonna beat you in
all those areas.
And I love the fact that you hit
on the three platforms.
You hit on Meta, you hit on Google,
you hit on TikTok, and those being 65
% of where people are spending money.
So if I'm trying to spend, if I
wanna jump into it, like how much money
should I realistically be expecting to spend to
start running ads initially for initial test?
Yeah, so it's a good question, but it's
also the wrong question to ask.
That's why you're here.
I know, I know, I know.
And this is why I love this question
because the answer that everyone is looking for
is if I spend X number of dollars,
I should begin to see success in the
ads.
And it's never the right way.
You have to reverse engineer your answer from
what can you afford and what is it
producing, right?
So I can sit here and say, if
I look at the smallest companies that I've
worked with that are spending five grand a
month on ads, for example, and I even
coach a few that are spending less than
that, do they see success?
Yeah, in some cases, no.
In other cases, is it scalable what they're
doing?
Probably not in some cases, but that's not
the number.
We gotta work backwards, right?
You gotta say, okay, how much money do
I have that I can spend and what
am I willing to risk of what I
can spend?
So let me give a framework for how
you're gonna figure this out.
Most brand new ad campaigns or if you've
been running paid ads and you just haven't
seen any traction because it's not well optimized,
I essentially consider that to be a new
campaign, if you will, because the data is
just not optimized.
We need to give it three months to
figure out what messaging is even landing on
the audience with what your offer is.
And another three months after that to figure
out what it is that's really, to basically
apply the winners and build it to scale
where it'll probably be profitable for you.
So it's six months of time that you
have to give it.
So you have to be willing to risk,
and this is what I talked about earlier,
right?
The idea to risk, to roll it, and
say, I'm gonna spend this much money for
six months and assume that I get absolutely
zero back.
That's what I demand of any client I
work with.
The expectation is that you're gonna spend $10
,000 a month on ads for six months.
You're gonna spend $60,000 and you will
get $0 out of it.
Now, has that ever been the case in
any of my experiences?
No.
But if your mindset is I'm gonna lose
60 grand, but I'm gonna see something that
works and figure some things out, right?
Then you're going in with the right mindset
because everything from there is a win.
And then you'll start to figure it out.
Now, could it happen faster?
Absolutely.
But on average for most of our clients
when we work with it, it's that.
So how much can you afford to spend
to do it?
Now, that's just what you gotta spend on
the platform.
Then you gotta pay someone to manage it
or you gotta be open to learning yourself
on how to manage it, which presents its
own difficulties in and of itself.
The platforms are more and more complex these
days, which is good because it gives us
functions that we didn't have access to even
a few years ago, but it's also hard
because you gotta unlearn it.
So you gotta pay your team to manage
it on top of that, right?
And so most companies are charging 2,000
to 5,000 a month on top of
that just to manage building everything and all
that.
Because the reality is what's happening today, it's
not about the settings and tweaks and buttons
you push.
It's about the message and the content and
the creative that you put into these platforms
to get the results.
And it's about understanding how to identify what's
working and not working and eliminate what's not
and double down on what is.
So that's what you're paying for in that
expertise.
So that's how you gotta work backwards.
And now a quick break to hear from
our sponsor.
Hey, it's Ty Crandall with Credit Suite.
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forward slash consult.
When you figure out what that number is,
right?
Then you'll start to have a pretty good
idea of where you are.
For most folks, that's around five grand a
month, much less than that becomes very difficult
to run paid ads at scale effectively, unless
you're gonna be in there as yourself doing
it, managing it and really playing in that
space.
There are some really neat AI tools that
are coming out to help with that, but
the reality is all the good ones are
costing as much as an agency does anyway.
So it's great to say, yeah, I got
an AI tool, but it may not be
as exciting as you think it's gonna be.
So that's the reality.
But then you also have to look at
it, the next overarching question to say is,
okay, well, if I do risk it and
it doesn't work, what's that worth to my
company?
And then start figuring that out, right?
And then the last question is, are you
ready to scale with paid ads?
And what I mean by that is, is
your offer in the flow of your customers
from when they find out about you to
when they become the end thing that you
wanna be, does that make sense, right?
Paid ads, it can be expensive, right?
In many cases, you're talking 20 to $100
per lead, depending on the niche and the
business you're operating in.
And the more that that lead is worth
to you as a business, the more it's
gonna cost you.
So do you have all the right things
to convert them in?
Like, for example, I'm generating leads, do I
have a CRM that's gonna drip emails and
text them to get them to book a
call with me?
If they're booking calls, do I have someone
who can take the calls, right?
If it's like, yeah, I gotta book a
call, but it takes two weeks for me
to get on your calendar, well, in that
two weeks, I'm probably booking with somebody else.
I'm probably not talking to you because that's
a long time from now if I want
something today.
So you've gotta have the right infrastructure behind
you as well to make sure that you're
ready to tackle on that as well.
And that doesn't have to be built overnight,
but you do need to make sure it's
there.
Otherwise, what you're doing is you're essentially adding
gasoline to a fire, which is great, that's
awesome, but the fire is out of control.
And so it doesn't really help you.
It just ends up burning your business to
the ground at the end of the day,
usually.
Yeah.
What I love about your strategy, several things.
I first of all, I love just that
you're upfront.
You're saying, look, it's gonna require an investment.
You have to kind of come into it
with this unreasonable expectation that it's not gonna
work, because it always works.
It just takes time.
And that sets the expectation where you kind
of under-promise and over-deliver, which not
a lot of people do that.
Absolutely, I love that you do that.
And I love the fact that you're talking
about a strategy that just makes you stronger
every step of the way.
I guess you're building those three pillars.
You're just gonna be a better place.
Like you're gonna have a website that's gonna
make you look way better and increase your
conversions.
You're gonna have a CRN that does a
lot of the automation for you.
And that helps you get and convert more
people and stay in front of it.
I mean, every one of these things that
you're building helps you along the way, do
more and more and more.
And then it's almost like an explosion.
Like once you get to a point where
you start testing ads and you find the
right demographic to market to and the right
messaging and the right message to market match,
then it's just like explosive with the potential.
And then at that point, you've got something
that legitimately can scale.
So here's the thing I find is that
Facebook for, I'll just use Facebook as an
example.
They make it seem really easy.
Like when you start running Facebook ads, it's
so easy to be able to spend a
little money and run an ad and get
a result.
But then when you try to scale it,
like hey, dude, they are a-holes.
I mean, it's middle fingers in the air
to you.
Like I've never seen anything like it.
It's like the more money you spend, the
more they punish you.
And it got to a point, and it's
never changed.
Ever since I ever started marketing with these
guys, it's like you almost get in there
and they're like, yeah, I can do this.
I can do this.
And you start to go, you get a
good ROI.
And the minute you even start to scale
it a little bit, like all of a
sudden they just slap you down.
And I've just never found a way to
ever conquer that as an entrepreneur, unless you're
hiring somebody like you that understands that and
ad sets and rotation and all the things
that are needed to be able to actually
make it work at scale.
Yeah, and so you're absolutely right.
And the reason for that is this.
Facebook works all based on this crazy algorithm
that they've developed.
And it's great and it's terrible for the
same reason.
It's great because it's awesome at finding the
people that we wanna find, but it's terrible
because as you think about like a target,
right?
If you've ever like done shooting or anything
like that, right?
It's very easy to say everything lives in
this small circle, right?
And if that's the only thing I have
to hit, it's very easy for me to
hit only this.
But as I expand what I could potentially
hit, right?
And I change the weapon with which I'm
firing with, which is my offer and the
audience I'm going after.
It becomes increasingly difficult to always hit the
center of the target every single time.
And so what happens for most business owners
is as they scale, Facebook says, well, it's
easy to find just this for $1,000
a month.
I got that all day long, so it
works great.
But then you wanna spend $10,000 a
month and this doesn't exist at 10.
There's not enough people in this small circle
for 10,000.
So then it says, I gotta go a
little bit bigger and a little bit bigger
and a little bit bigger and a little
bit bigger.
And so you start getting more and more
off centers and your lead costs are a
little bit different because now the message is
not 100% perfect, it's only 98%
perfect or 90% perfect or 85%
perfect.
And so if people don't convert as well,
it's then my cost goes up and da
-da-da-da-da, right?
And so that's what happens for most folks.
So scaling paid ads profitably requires several things.
First is just go slow.
No one wants to hear that, but that's
how you do it.
I generally don't increase more than maximum 10
% a day in most cases.
There's a few exceptions to that, but if
I'm increasing more than 10%, you're almost always
gonna break the ROAS, the return on ad
spending.
Number two is as you scale, it requires
more creative, right?
Because sometimes as you exit out of the
perfect customer, the next step is still a
very good customer, but they need a bit
more pushing to come your direction.
So I gotta sit in front of them
a few more times.
I gotta hit them with a few more
ad variations because they're gonna tune me out
the first four, five, six times before they
finally convert, right?
And so then it becomes, how do I
scale this?
Well, it's not just about spending more money.
It's also about increasing creative, changing that out,
right, so for example, we're working with a
client right now.
I'm about to launch 67 new pieces of
creative for a one month test.
Of those 67, probably three, if I'm lucky,
will make it in a month from now.
One will definitely make it.
Two, probably, maybe.
Three would be amazing if it did.
The other 64 are gonna fall off the
wayside, but I still have to create them,
build them, think about it, write the script,
create the content, do all of that, right?
So that's where scale starts to happen.
And most folks aren't doing that level of
creative, right?
They're not launching 60, 70, 80, 100 plus
content, pieces of content for a month to
see what's working and what's figuring out, and
then doubling down on three out of 60
that worked.
They're doing two or three, and I wanna
know why it's not scaling because people have
already checked out, right?
They've already seen the ancillary audience that's next
up to 98%, to 95%.
They've seen that it wasn't enough to convert
them.
So I've gotta go more, more, more, and
that's where it becomes harder, right?
So scale requires those things.
And usually it requires someone who understands to
look at the metrics, not just to say,
well, I spent more money, what happened?
But I spent more money, what happened?
What was the click-through rate?
What was the cost per million?
Or sorry, cost per million.
What am I seeing on this?
What was the click-through rate on the
page?
What was the signup rate from those who
signed up?
How many opened the emails?
Like all these things influence the offer from
A to Z.
And if you don't look at all components
of that, then I can't fix the first
component, which influences all the rest of them.
Yeah, Bob, I love the way you break
this down.
So if we look at outside of the
three pillars, we look outside of paid ads,
is there other things in digital marketing we
should be paying attention to?
Yeah, I mean, there's lots of very interesting
things out there right now that are maybe
not scalable, but cool, fun to play with,
different and unique.
If you are a local business, so you
operate in a physical location in a city
and your customers are in a radius of
where your shop is, Google My Business is
still hands down one of the best.
Yelp is also very, very good.
And there's a lot of really cool things
that we can do there.
One of my favorites for local businesses is
Google Local Service Ads.
It's a great way because you only pay
for qualified leads.
If someone comes in and it was a
BS lead, they're not a real lead, it's
a spam submission, Google actually refunds you for
that and only charge you for legitimate leads.
So it's a nice pay-to-play type
methodology, right?
So that's number one.
Number two is there's a very, very interesting
dynamic of content creation, like this podcast, for
example, that you can go out and find
and get yourself a lot of really interesting
customers.
There's tons of very small podcasts and people
always think, oh, if I wanna be on
a podcast, for example, I gotta go be
on Alex Ramoses or Tony Robbins or all
these big guys.
And the reality is you don't actually wanna
be on most of those guys, unless you
have this, that you're operating at that scale
where you wanna be is in a very
small one.
So for example, one of my good friends,
he runs a podcast in the self-storage
space, but specifically targeted towards those instruction companies
who build self-storage facilities.
So, I mean, there can't be more than
a couple thousand people in total in the
whole market, right?
So an average episode for him is getting
maybe six, 700 downloads, which seems irrelevant, but
that means that he's reaching 40% of
the entire market of that group, which is
unreal.
And so for a very small cost, if
I can pay to be on his podcast,
if that's the group that I wanna get
in front of, right?
And reach those kinds of people, why?
Cause he's got that small reach and that
very niche reach.
So there's a lot of interesting things that
we can do there.
And then right now, and I know everyone
probably hammers on this, but AI is just,
I mean, it's crazy what AI can do
right now.
There's lots of unique abilities to set things
up with these agents, these AI agents that
can do a lot of work for you.
I'm sure if you're at all, even remotely
plugged into the AI space, even just a
little bit, you've probably heard of OpenClaw recently.
And now Clawed has their own variable of
it.
And there's a few others coming out.
ChatGPT does as well now.
And Gemini's is coming out very shortly too.
But these agents can do a lot of
really interesting things.
They can dive in and say, show me
all the information that my competitors are doing
online.
And how do I do it better than
what they're doing?
What gaps are there, right?
One of my favorites, for example, is let's
say I run a local service company or
any service-based company, right?
There's always review sites.
Yelp, there's TripAdvisor, there's always some sort of
ranking site that exists for every niche.
I can send my agent to that site,
tell it to look for all my competitors,
if I know who they are even better,
actually say, go to this page, look through
all the reviews, compile all the things you
think that they're doing the best and where
all the complaints lie and summarize the biggest
complaints that you see.
Now I know every problem that my competitors
are having and I can go solve that
thing better than they do and win more
customers because I already know that it's a
problem that people are complaining about, so I
can win that way.
So that's some interesting ways to do that.
And then even the next level of that,
right?
So you can get like open call, for
example, you install it on a Mac mini,
which everyone's talking about.
So it's a $700 computer or $600 computer,
right?
That I can go buy, install the thing.
And granted, this is not like, I'm making
it sound very simple.
It's a bit more complex than this, yes.
But the idea is I put this on
there.
I can actually then buy a phone number
for that thing, right?
Doesn't have to be a super crazy high
plan.
I just need to be able to do
text messaging from it, really, that's all I
need, and attach it to that.
And now all of a sudden, I can
message on an iPhone with blue squares instead
of green squares, and immediately my response rate's
gonna two to three X to a regular
text.
Because why?
I'm sending it from an iPhone, so they
assume that it's a more real person.
It feels like a more real connection.
It feels higher quality.
It's what I'm looking for as a human
being versus some random text.
It also bypasses the whole send stop to
unsubscribe.
Now, there are quantifications, right?
If you go do that, and you send
a thousand texts in a single day, you're
gonna probably get shut down by Apple.
And there's other variabilities to this you have
to be aware of, right?
It's not just this blue ocean of do
whatever the heck you want.
But there's a lot of interesting things that
we can play with in that space to
start to generate leads and stay in connection
with people.
And if for no other reason, right, it
can simply help remind me of the things
I need to be doing that I forget
about.
Let's say you can't afford to hire a
assistant right now because you're a small company
with a small budget.
Well, for 600 bucks and some credits of
probably under $100 a month, I can have
a fully functioning assistant that sends me a
text every day of what I should be
doing.
It can go out and scrape leads for
me and say, okay, here's the top 25
people you need to call today to go
get business.
Perfect.
Eight o'clock in the morning, boom.
Let me start dialing for dollars, right?
Like there's a lot of cool things that
we can do out there that don't require
a ton of spend.
I'm not.
All marketing, digital or otherwise, requires two things,
time or money.
Sometimes both.
So you have to be understanding where you're
at.
Do you have time, but not a lot
of money?
Well, then some of this AI stuff is
probably where you need to be.
Do you have money, but not a lot
of time?
Well, then paid ads is probably where you
need to be.
Or I need to hire someone who can
replace my time, which costs money.
So always want to be thinking about those
things.
If you have neither time or money, you
need to stop for a second and look
at what you're doing in your business and
figure out how to go get one or
the other for yourself.
Otherwise, you're always gonna be in the same
boat.
Wow, I love this.
This has been really powerful.
There's been, I don't know how many actionable
strategies and just literally you've built a roadmap
for us on how to succeed.
I could literally talk to you for hours,
but what should everybody doing here that wants
to talk more, wants to figure out where
they are and what they should be doing
to build a scalable digital marketing strategy?
How can they get in touch with you?
What should they do?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
And I'd love to chat with anybody.
If you head to our website for me,
it's gogo3dc.com, which is for Go Three
Degrees Consulting.
That's our company, Three Degrees.
So go3dc.com forward slash Bob McIntosh.
And it's spelled M-C-I-N-T
-O-S-H.
I'm sure that Ty here will put it
in the show notes.
And you go to that page right there
and you can either book a call with
me directly or my contact cards on there
with my personal cell phone on there as
well.
So you can reach out to me, book
a call, chat with me, just reach out,
we'll schedule a time.
Be more than happy to talk about what
you got going on in your business, what
scaling could look like.
And look, if we're a good fit, I'll
help you.
If not, I'll tell you why we're not
and what you should do to get to
where we could be.
All right, thanks for joining us today, Bob.
Appreciate it.