We all know that marketing is essential to growing our business. And yet it’s far too easy to get distracted by the shiny objects and not focus on what really matters.

In this wide-ranging interview, I sit down with Caleb Roche, a marketing consultant that designs and implements marketing for companies large and small.

We discuss consumer sentiment and behavior, making an effective website, SEO and how to best get started establishing a long-term brand strategy.

I learned a ton about what’s changing in marketing and look forward to implementing additional structures into my own business from this discussion!

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

Adam Liette
What's going on operators Welcome to this week's interview. We're gonna be talking about one of my absolute favorite topics. I say that a lot, don't I, but this one, I'm really mean it we're going to be diving in to marketing. Because marketing is essential, right? It's how we're going to grow our business, how we're going to propel our growth, get new clients, grow our teams, it all kind of starts with our marketing framework and our marketing hat on to continue to bring in those students those members that cashflow we need to propel our growth. So I brought in an expert today I brought in Caleb Roach, Caleb is the marketing strategist for C Roach consulting, they work with both small and large enterprise level businesses to help them not only create, but then implement marketing strategies to help fuel their growth and grow their companies. Thank you so much for joining me, Caleb, how are you today?

Caleb Roche
Good. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you having me on.

Adam Liette
Absolutely. So super eager just to start with some of your background, like how did you get to this place and to be as passionate about marketing as you are?

Caleb Roche
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. So I first started started thinking that I wanted to go into the legal profession. So I started a legal internship with a local attorney here in Oklahoma City. And realize very quickly, within about a year that I did not that the legal side of things that I saw on TV was completely different than what I expected. I expected to be able to walk into the courtroom and say, Hey, Your Honor, I rest my case. And my the defendant gets off. But it was a lot of writing. And I as much of a nerd as I am. I hated sitting and looking at writing the entire day. So what that did was it propelled kind of as I worked for the firm, I noticed that there was pieces of marketing that I really enjoyed, you know, what is the website look like? And I hope no one can ever find that website that I created. Because I started us, like, let me build your website, I, I got I rented a camera, I took photos of the courthouse, I thought it was so cool. And looking back. I mean, this was probably the worst website I've ever built. But that being said, it really propelled my interest in marketing. And so my career choice, whether I was going to go into legal field or not, was to go into at least a business degree because I had been coached and mentored to say, even if you do become a lawyer, it always helps to have not to go into like a political science degree. So I've chosen marketing from the very beginning, I was always interested in consumer behavior. And so what that did was I went to college for marketing, I got my bachelor's in marketing. And by the time that I finished my program, I had kind of figured out what I wanted to do, I wanted to say we want non marketing side, whether it was a marketing agency side, or you know, a corporate level side job. And so I interviewed at a couple of different agencies, and locally, the agency world does not pay very well, for starters. And so I'm married at the time, we have a kid, you know, on the way and so the offers that I was getting, I was like, I can't support a family based on that, you know, there's no way. So I ended up getting an offer from a company called Inspire brands that owns Sonic, Jimmy John's Buffalo Wild Wings, Arby's rescue target, there's a couple other brands. And what I was able to do is I worked there for about two years and consumer behavior, consumer insights. So we would test products that went to more pre pre going to market, see, you know, if they have a triple dog, Kony cheeseburger, what's the saltiness level? And you know, how many, how does the just about right of lettuce compared to the tomato, and we need to take the tomato off that are too much. And so I spent two years working in there, which was incredible, because I got a lot of exposure to these big level decisions, big budgets, it's not just, Hey, we're gonna run a Facebook campaign for 30 bucks. I mean, we're looking at something completely different. So during my time there i i realized very quickly at the same time that I did not want someone telling me when to show up, and when I can take time off and when not as much as I can't control that now still, but I wanted to have a little bit more control that oh, my gosh, I you know, we have a baby appointment. And they're like, well, you're gonna have to request time off. I absolutely did not like that. So while I'm working for inspire, I started my quote, unquote, side hustle, started doing marketing consulting on the side, got a couple of businesses very small that I worked into. And before you know, within two years, COVID rolls around, I'm working from home, it's becoming a lot easier to kind of have a side hustle. And it got to the point where I was making more off that then I was in my full time salary job. And so when my wife and said, Hey, been doing this for three months, like that, we've made enough income, let's do it on our own. And so I transitioned full time into owning my own marketing consulting firm where we've kind of grown into hiring employees and we've grown and scaled from you know, we were no long You're charging our small business clients 200 bucks a month for marketing consulting. So that's been a plus as well. But we're starting to work with a lot larger companies and providing strategic directions. And so that's kind of our story long winded story, but it has a couple of different pieces that are kind of fun and hilarious at the same time.

Adam Liette
I love that so much, Caleb, especially that consumer behavior aspect, we could nerd out for a while we might, that might be the direction that we take this because I'm a geek about that stuff. I think it's amazing.

Caleb Roche
When I do think one of the things that we've we've noticed within any of the businesses that we work with, whether they're small or even corporate based, a majority of them are really not focused on consumer behavior. They're focused on the fun side of marketing, you know, the shiny side, hey, we're gonna run Facebook ads, we're gonna do some sort of advertising, we're gonna shoot this whole video, but they don't look at the backend and say, Okay, on the product side, is our product delivering on expectations for our consumers? And how are we developing better products? What are we adding? How can we do it price increases all these different types of things. And what people don't typically understand is that all falls within marketing, it might seem like it's a supply chain issue or a product development. But product development really falls under marketing on the grand scheme of things, you have a product developer, but outside of that, you're messaging, how you take it to in market, what that does for lift on market share across different percentages. So that's where I think a lot of people have to shift their focus on now it's becoming a popular trend to think about consumer insights. And what is your consumer thinking? What are they wanting? And how are we developing better products around our consumer?

Adam Liette
Oh, my God, we're opening Pandora's box. I love it. Yeah, this is gonna be a three hour podcast, everyone should be a mini MBA in consumer insights. So if you're listening to the show, and you've never dived into that part of your brand, or you don't know how to get started, like, what are some ways if you're not collecting this information right now? Like, how can you get started? Caleb,

Caleb Roche
I think it really starts with a lot of and again, this, this could be translated a couple different ways across either a small business or corporate side. So I think it starts with a lot of self reflection and introspection introspective, this on the corporation or the individual running the business, because you really have to sit down and say, What key metrics can we actually identify that would kind of help propel us in this direction? And sometimes that can be a very difficult question to ask yourself, because there's maybe 1000 different things, or maybe there's nothing that you can see. But it all starts with asking the questions of diving into that and saying, Okay, what is our customer retention rate look like? You know, if you're more of a product based service, how often are buybacks happening when our customers coming back? Is it only when we do promotions? So there's a lot and we can dive further into this if you want. But I think there's a lot of questions that you can ask and a lot of different KPIs key performance, like indicators that you can see within your business that doesn't require an MBA to look at and say, Okay, we are failing on customers coming back. Like we know that. So why aren't they coming back? And starting to dive in and asking the biggest pieces asking your customers questions, don't be afraid to ask them questions when they come in. If you're a retail based business, if you're b2b, if you're Sask, start finding ways that you can interact with your customers, current customers, and new and past customers that maybe didn't have a good experience, or that haven't come back and establish those questions. Why didn't you come back? What about our service? Was it that made you not come back? Or, you know, why did you leave not a very direct tone, but finding ways that you can ask and say, like, we're interested, why what, what would, what would it take for you to come back and start asking those questions to see if someone left? Are there things that you can add to your product? Are there things that you can add to your service offerings? Are there things that you need to take off? And so it all starts with a lot of introspection, and then at the same time, also asking your customers just point blank questions, you know, not very direct, but hey, why didn't you like this service? And, you know, marketing fashion, but so I think that's the first key to understanding because when we talk to people, it's like, you know, with your business, if I asked you that question, I might have a completely different idea from what I've seen on the outside versus what you see. And you have to combine both of those. Because as business owners, as executives, whatever that looks like, we can be very narrow minded and what we think is going wrong or going right. And sometimes our intuition really helps us. But sometimes it leads us astray as well, because we focus on well, maybe they're not coming back, because our price is too high. And so they focus on okay, what can we do to drop our margins? What can we do to drop this? And then that's what they do. They don't see any value from that, when instead, maybe they should have said, how can we add more value to the current price? And what can we do to you know, to alienate that and make it a little bit better? So those are kind of the two tips that I would say at the very beginning side, just ask your customers and do a lot of like self reflection on what are we looking at from our internal perspective and what needs change from our perspective, marrying that with what like one of your customers said as

Adam Liette
well? Very nice. That's smart. I love the idea of looking in first, because it's it's easy to just make broad assumptions without actually taking the time to like search through your feelings and your thoughts and your intuitions. And coming to that place versus just need to answer right now. And it's never that easy. So when

Caleb Roche
we and I've seen everyone has biases, and so we personally believe that there's something wrong with our business or that there's something wrong with the organization or a department or whatever that looks like. And the the other piece is that we have yet to be very careful when analyzing things like this is data has now you know, that you hear the term data is more valuable than oil at this point, there's so much data. And so as as great as that is, and how effective it is to help build a business. At the same time. There's so much data out there, what do you translate? And so that's the other piece is, what is your bias towards the data? And what is the data telling you or lying to you about? Because you can take two different directions on that piece?

Adam Liette
And which piece of the data you're looking at? Are you looking at it from a like a holistic perspective? Or are you like honing in on just one figure and trying to make that one figure move? And that might not be the one figure that you need to make move? You know, it could be a different figure, but it starts with that I like it. Man. Yeah, there's

Caleb Roche
a there's a lot you can unpack, I think that really relates to what you probably talked with, with individuals about is on a leadership standpoint, I mean, you don't walk in and tell someone, when you're coaching someone, you don't come in and say, hey, you need to improve on this one thing, it's going to translate into other things, you have to identify what things do we need to work on? What things are you doing effectively? And how do we, you know, mirror and match those things to combine this great individual or this great company? And so there's so many different pieces that you can't just throw glue on it and say, Well, we're gonna drop the price. And that drops, you know, that saves all of our problems. There's so much data, there's so many things that you have to look at on a broad perspective.

Adam Liette
Yeah. And it's also important to establish like a real firm baseline and understanding what numbers are really doing. Because if we're looking at numbers and a very micro sense of the word, like our sales for this week, or that, but you got to like broaden it out to but what were they for the month? What were they for the quarter? How does that average out? Because we have good weeks and bad weeks? And that's kind of part of the ebb and flow of being in business. And it's about seeing things through the bigger perspective in addition to the micro right. Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic. Well, one little trick I'll share with you podcast listeners, you know, Caleb is talking about asking questions. And we all want testimonials. We all want social proof. Yep, you should be getting those before you automate it. actually get on a call with your customers. And sneak those questions into your testimonial interview. You can find out more about the customer by sneaking it in when you already have a warm audience. So it's it's it's a neat little trick, I've use

Caleb Roche
some gold right there. That's that's the people should have to pay for that you shouldn't like pay. Well, that right there.

Adam Liette
Well, yeah, there, there might be an example of one of my testimonial scripts inside the paid part, you know?

Caleb Roche
Hey, great. I love it.

Adam Liette
For sure, fantastic. Oh, cool. Well, we'll definitely swing back around to this because it all it all drives is driven by consumer behavior. And one of the things interesting things that there's a lot of mixed messages are out right now. And it's something you were stressing on your site about the services you guys offer, and really coming down to the website. Now, I come from the Click Funnels universe where they say websites are dead. And now everyone's building funnel hubs now, like, what is it that you're seeing from your side that makes the website imperative and part of what businesses still need to this day to grow?

Caleb Roche
Yeah, and I think, you know, I think if you put 100 different marketing experts in a room, I think you would have a completely different opinion from everyone. And so I think that's the beautiful part about marketing. And everything that's happening is there's all these different perspectives. So what we're seeing is we've seen a lot of people have this conversation, it's like, okay, why do I need a website? What's that important? And it all boils down to what's your point of what you're doing? And so if you, if you think you need a website, why do you think you need a website, because if you think you need a website, just for a website, you probably should get a website, but you're not going to put the time and dedication into actually having that website. Because if you just think, well, it's a website, that's great. You know, I have a website people can go to, it's always good to have a baseline perspective, or at least a funnel or something. But it will really boils down to, there's so many different channels that people are on, and it's hitting that piece of organic search that's so important. And so, you know, it's like, it's like if you look at tick tock Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, apps, Click Funnels website, there's so many different things you can do and what we advise our clients and obviously, from our perspective, we do believe websites are important. And I can I'll dive into that in a minute. But what we see is go into the channels that, obviously either an expert or just for you, if you're identifying it on your own, go into the channels that you're willing to dedicate the time and that you personally think are going to help you and test it. And if it doesn't work, adapt, because if I tell you that, you know, there's a lot of says apps are taking over websites right now, as much as I think people are on apps a lot. I think there's a lot of pieces that people are missing out on that. Because a you have to get someone to download the app, you have to have them keep the app and use the app regularly. Because from my perspective, I already Mac, sell my data, you know, like I have a 250 gigabyte phone, I just recently had to delete like 10 apps because they're like gigabyte plus, and I'm trying to make storage occupies go get a new phone with bigger storage, but here I am. And so you got to think about it, the apps might be more popular, but at the end of the day, like you have to get someone to download it, how are you going to get them to download it, what offer you or product are you going to offer on there. And then the other piece is, you can either build the app, or you can hire someone. And I don't know if you've looked at app building rates, but I mean, they're like 20 to $50,000 for a minimally viable product. And that's just like a basic sign in page with a couple pages. And I can promise you websites are much cheaper, especially for Click Funnels, too. So if you think about like, from a broad budget perspective, a corporate side that has the resources and abilities to build an app. That's great. That's awesome. But on the other piece is how do you get people to that app? It's not like people are browsing the app store every day. I mean, there are some people, but I'd say 95% of consumers are not I don't open up my phone. And instead of going to tick tock or Facebook or Google, I look up okay, what are the trending apps like I might do that weekly or monthly. But it takes a lot of effort to get your your app in the actual rankings as well. So there's that piece now on that Click Funnels versus website versus not having a website, I think one is better than the other. And so I do think no matter if you do a click funnel, if you do a website, I think that's better than nothing. Because if you have no online visibility, if people still like there are still so many Google searches happening, that if you're not capturing at least one of those, I mean, why aren't you it takes literally five minutes to build something, even if it's not anything amazing, like, at least have that on there. I'm not saying to do that. But I'm just saying at the very minimum, that would be the least you could do. The reason why we think websites are so important is because we have seen so many clients, so many businesses that are started very small, that have generated so much traffic just from having a really well built out website with really good back end as well built for sel. And so what I what I typically refer to with our clients is, I don't and I'll put a disclaimer, like I'm not saying this to say well, if you build a website, this is the results that you can see, because you really never know what you're going to get out of a website, or SEO or how long it takes. It's a long game. We had a small medical billing company here in rural Oklahoma that, you know, if you think of rural Oklahoma, you don't think of like corporate level, like, you know, very small, let's say, and so they had a website, they've gone through a couple different websites, they've never really liked it, we built one. And a year later, we're like, Hey, you're getting some traction, you maybe have 100,000 Organic impressions online, you go through Google every every year, which, you know, thinking about it, it's about 10,000. It's not anything huge, but it's it's still something. And so they the first year, they generated about 1000 clicks and 10,000 Organic impressions or 100,000 Organic impressions online. So we said hey, like this is great. But we're going to take this to the next level, they added a blog, they added some landing pages. And this year, second year in, they've hit their they'll hit by the end of the year, a million organic impressions, and 10,000 clicks online. And it's already translated into several pieces of business from Connecticut from Texas, I mean, they're like getting traffic that because they can serve this those types of people. And so the thing that I always tell people is, like what they they've minimally invested, it's not like they've spent 10s of 1000s of dollars. And if you look at the advertising piece, to get a million impressions, they're looking at an average cost per 1000 impressions of 20 bucks. So they they would have had to spend about $50,000 Just to get those impressions, and not even those conversions. And so, again, everyone have different ideas, but that's why we believe the importance of a website is because there's still so much organic search traffic. And it really helps supplement a paid strategy because you can start the paid strategy. You know, if you're trying to get instant business to support, you know, traffic to your website, build out the back end of the website to where within, I'm gonna say two years that might be a long period for most people thinking or listening to this, but in two years, that's going to pay off dramatically and you're going to you're going to be able to pull that paid ads budget in either keep that and have like a functioning organic search traffic or you can allocate that towards a different piece of your

Adam Liette
business. That's brilliant. I love it because you're you we need to be on both sides of the same coin at the same time. We need to be thinking about the immediate but also the long game we are building companies for the long game. And if you're stuck in those short term paradigms, it's only a matter of time before the next Facebook Zuck slap comes and destroys Facebook, you know, we're in the middle of now. Right what we talked

Caleb Roche
about, I mean, and that's what I like, though, the one thing that we talked to people about is Okay, so let's say you throw all of your baskets in websites, so your only channel is your website, what happens if Google goes down? We know it's not going to happen for a while, we know it's probably never going to happen. But what if they get hit with some like Monopoly regulation where they have to pull their search down, something like that it can happen. And so now all your eggs are in one basket, you have your website? Same thing with Facebook, if the Facebook outage happens, your retail business, how do you communicate with your customers, if you lose two days of Facebook, if that's the only way that you like, if you don't have an email list, if you don't have a website? How are people going to find you, you know, like, so that's where it, you can't throw all of your eggs in one basket, it's always good to be very strategic in what you do, and very intentional. But at the same time, you can't just rely on one thing to generate all of your business.

Adam Liette
Absolutely. 100%. Fully agree. There's nothing. There's something I was thinking of there. Oh, the other. The added benefit, I think, with my marketing hat on is when someone is Google searching, versus scrolling through tick tock or whatever. Like they're coming at it with intention, like they're searching for their problems. So they are a much higher prospect just by the fact that they are the one initiating the conversation, initiating the search versus interruption marketing, which is a whole different thing. So yeah, I mean, I have a website, and I'm a Click Funnels guy. So you know, obviously, I wanted to set it up a little bit, but um, even I do think, website for God's sakes, you know, yeah,

Caleb Roche
I will say like, I really think Click Funnels can be an effective strategy, especially if you're doing paid because if you do face, like, if you can direct any advertising efforts to a landing page where you have very defined product offerings, I think that's huge. And that's why I think the effectiveness of Click Funnels is great. I can't speak to the effectiveness of like, organic search, I know Click Funnels reached out like they, they've started doing SEO like abilities, I don't know the the side of it, like I'm assuming it's probably pretty good if they've built it. But the one piece of search that I think is so important is page depth, you can't just put a three page website out and expect to get 100 A million impressions. I mean, you have to have like a 500 to 1000 page website. And I don't think people understand that they think I can just put a website out with some content on there. And you might get some, like, you know, some impressions and clicks, but you're not going to get the organic search traffic, if you just let your website sit stagnant. And so that's where I do think you have to segment all these channels. And I know, we haven't really talked too much about tick tock or Facebook. But on advertising, you have to segment what you're doing and why you're doing it. Because you can't just expect like Facebook ads to work with every business. You can't expect LinkedIn, you can't expect tick tock, and all the impressions are relative 1000 impressions on Facebook, might be comparable to 100 impressions on Google in 10,000 impressions on tick tock, because they're all different channels. They're all not bad. But we're all going off of what I got 10,000 impressions. That's huge. And while you're getting in front of people, are you getting in front of the right people? That's the biggest piece. Hmm.

Adam Liette
I love that about page depth too. And if you're thinking, well, that's a lot of pages to make. Well, I mean, as as yourself, guys, like, if you have a content strategy, like you're making YouTube videos, or like I have this podcast, I make a new page for every podcast episode. And it's about consistency, building that over time. We're never going to build this business overnight. So stop pretending we can. And instead,

Caleb Roche
so you're telling me I can't build a million dollar business by tomorrow? Oh, man,

Adam Liette
it's ours. I ordered my Ferrari dang it. Yeah,

Caleb Roche
that's gonna be my headline. Dang it. No. And I think it's something to be said like, and there's so many different pieces, you know, depending on how what your budget looks like, and like how much time you have. But I mean, there's like on Fiverr, there are transcribers. You can they're paid transcribers that, like for a podcast, you can hire and pay between $5 and $100, depending on quality, and get a full like 500 to 1000 word transcription of your podcasts that Google is going to recognize. And so like it's, it's super simple throw YouTube embed code on there, along with some text and there's content for you.

Adam Liette
I use otter.ai, which is like 20 bucks a month. And you've got like 100,000 minutes trans. It's all machine translated. But we're, you know, we're talking about keywords. We're talking about content. We're talking about depth of the website, which Google is looking for. And that all kind of leads into SEO, which is this huge phrase, and with decades of bad knowledge now, because it's all been outdated. So what are the current things that you're seeing working for SEO that we can start working towards?

Caleb Roche
So what we're seeing and again, this is Another thing with like the website where, like, we see, we have our different strategies, and you can talk to 10 different people, and everyone's gonna say something different. What we recommend right now for our clients is building out local hyperlocal landing pages, depending on if you're like a local business or like nationwide as well, of building out a simple like landing page for a specific city, county state, and providing, you know, so for us, like marketing consulting services in Edmond, Oklahoma, or Oklahoma City or New York, New York. And so what we do with those is you add a heading one tag on that, and then you provide a lot of content to where it's not. And I say a lot of content, make sure it's very specific, because I've seen some people and it seems to be working now. But I think with all the algorithm changes, they'll throw on their marketing consulting page for New York, New York, New York City is a population town of 3,000,550. And while it gets you on the search terms, I think Google is getting extremely smart on what they're doing. And so when they're scraping pages, I think there's gonna be a lot of shifts. And so when you're building out these hyper local landing pages, you have to make it relevant to that specific area to tell Google, hey, this is the spot. But you can't just keyword stuff at this point. Like it's Google's gotten way smarter for that. And so while it might work in the short term, I think there's a lot of penalties that people are not seeing until a little bit farther that they're starting to get penalized for. So I'd say the first thing that we're recommending is a look hyperlocal landing page strategy building out like, all of these different service categories for different areas. And then that relates to page depth. And so there's a couple of different ranking factors that Google that we use on our audit set, you never want to have an orphan page. And what that means is there's no you know, link to that page. And so if you go on your website, you would have to enter the straight URL, you couldn't find it off your website, that's one of the big things that we're seeing with our clients is making sure that there are no orphan pages and making sure that there's multiple click throughs to each page. And so if you think about it from a, like, you know, let's say a map perspective, you got to show Google the map of where you're going. And so you've got to navigate users through an experience to where they go on your homepage. They go on about, here's all your different links, and then showing the page step from there, which leads into the page step side of things, you want to make sure that you have some sort of sitemap, well, we seem to be really successful recently is, at the bottom of your footer, add like a sitemap link, where it drops to an actual page built for a sitemap that links all of your main pages and Main Navigation sites. And then that can link into further depth for different links. But what that does is it builds reputation across Google from our perspective, and I'm not Google, so I can't tell if it actually does. But what we've seen successful. When you have that Sitemap link in the footer, not only does that folder, every page of the footer drop to that Sitemap. So now you've got, let's say, 50 pages that dropped to that sitemap page. Now, that's one depth in to that Sitemap. And then you can do like an areas we serve, which is now a page that has all the areas that you serve with all the services linked to those landing pages. So you're like three or four pages deep, that have, you know, 50 pages, referring into it, to where now your website has a lot of page depth. Because to get to the local landing pages, you got to sitemap areas we serve and now that and so it's a way to show Google that, hey, this is something that we do. But we're not keyword stuffing, because we're not trying to say, here's all the areas we serve at the bottom of our footer, it takes it into two or three different pages to where now you've got that access. So we've seen those two things to be really successful. And then this is like from the 2000s. Still, but blogging, consistent content is really huge as well. And it's something that I have to work on as our business. I can't preach this. I mean, if you look at our website, we're historically terrible at blogging because we're so focused on building our clients business. But I will say, seeing clients shift and traffic volume from blogs, and my say blog's, like having quality blogs, don't go buy a $5 blog from Fiverr. It's not a bad idea. But it's not a great idea. At the same time, it adds content. But Google is now looking at duplicate content they're looking at now they're like, they're looking at it from a humanistic perspective and AI perspective of how does this read, and as much as I love AI for blog posts, the one thing that you have to take into consideration for SEO is, we're not just looking for rankings, we're looking for on page experience as well. And so you can't just create an AI bot around what is marketing. And then lead people let's say you get 1000 clicks on what is marketing page. And it's an AI generated blog about what is marketing. Marketing is the science of getting consumers to buy a product marketing, helps uses Facebook ads and tick. Like, if I see that if I'm a consumer, I might have gotten 1000 clicks, but your bounce rate is going to be like 95% Because your AI generated blog while it's getting you the search rankings. It's not taking into account the user experience so you don't

Adam Liette
even know Anyone that was a genuine prospect now isn't

Caleb Roche
exactly, thank you. So that's where I think we have to build a lot of recognition around. There's a lot of information going around right now in the marketing space, just get traffic in, well, that's great. But your content has to be reflective of who you are and what you do. And so you can't just build all these blog posts, and it be terrible, because if we wrote a marketing blog that had no marketing information about it, everyone's going to click off and think we're like complete idiots, because they go to our page. And like this marketing consulting firm that serves large clients is saying, marketing, you should do Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads. It's all like, so that's the piece of SEO that you have to come up from, like a user experience side. So very long winded answer to SEO, but those are what we're seeing and some recommendations that we're providing to people.

Adam Liette
I love it. I think it's all very practical, too. And in some ways, it's so relieving to know that the cold keyword stuffing and like hidden black hat, gray hat or tricks are not working anymore, because trying to keep up with those is just exhausting. And now I argue about building like a quality experience, which is good anyway.

Caleb Roche
Yeah. And I will say I there are people that would probably say that they're still working. But I would say look at long term effects of it. And short term, they might be working very good, but long term effects, I think, next six months to a year, I think there's going to be a dramatic shift from like page rankings and how that works. So it's very, it's very exciting for people at actually doing the right things on their website.

Adam Liette
And if you don't believe us, like just Google, Google, Google, Google, there's actually a phrase for that. It's called the Google slap. And like, it's happened repeatedly, over and over again, like this is not just 2020 two's problem. This was 2010 problem, and 2005 and 2000s. Like this has happened over and over again, it's gonna happen again.

Caleb Roche
Yep. And that's why I think like SEO specifically has to be a long term strategy. If you're making the investment into it, you don't want to worry wasting money, you don't want to burn money, just thinking like, oh, my gosh, this is going to work. But at the same time, it's not like Facebook ads, where you deliver an ad right away to a consumer. And so when what we're saying to our clients is, we will never promise results. In period, we'll show you what we've done for clients, we'll show you what we've seen done. And we'll work our strategies and hope that works, we'll put a lot of time and effort, that's why you're paying us. But at the end of the day, if someone comes to you and says within one to three months, I can rank you on page one. Don't listen to those people anymore. I mean, again, maybe I'm going to put myself on the chopping block here. But I think the more that you hack the system, the more that you jumped in line without people knowing, I think it's just gonna hurt you long term and the detrimental effects of that getting your site like slapped by Google and having that like somewhat of a ban on the back end that you're not even seeing. That's going to be extremely detrimental, especially if you've spent so much time building content and a website around what you want, and when people can't even find it. So

Adam Liette
that doesn't keep you guys up at night. I don't know what that scares the heck out of me. So are there any platforms that work best or work better for actually building websites? Because I like there's there's the all in ones where like Kajabi, you can build your whole thing? Well, can you? Is it really the best or like what have you found to be the better platforms at least to build the front end?

Caleb Roche
So what we say from like, if you're hiring a semi decent website designer, even if you're trying to do it internally, the tools like square like we typically recommend either Squarespace or Wordpress. There's a lot of internal debate whether SEO rankings work really well with WordPress or SquareSpace Squarespace performance isn't as good as WordPress, WordPress is 1995 Compared to 2022. We're like Squarespace. So what we recommend is there are platforms that there's tons of platforms out there, the two main builders that we recommend are either WordPress or SquareSpace, Squarespace is going to be our main recommendation, because it has all the web hosting, because there's like, if you think about WordPress, not only do you have to build the website, you have to get some template builder, you have to get a lot of plugins to make sure that you can put an image in without having to hard code it. Now you've got to worry about hosting security, SSL, all of that based on your website. And so for a standard, even a corporate level business, I mean even let's say 25 million below, they don't have the time or resources typically to spend having someone just focus on a WordPress website. And so I mean, it takes like a full time thing if you if you think about it, like a full time person could spend all their time on WordPress and probably still not have enough time. And so that's typically what we say like on the web on the Squarespace side. Very functional. There's there's a couple limitations which that's why I recommend WordPress because you can't you can do a lot on it, but it's not just a straight hard code search. There's some functionality that you really have to look at when before deciding to do Squarespace. But one thing we love about Squarespace is it's drag and drop, you can move things, but at the same time, you can also code and you can add, you can add all of your pixel codes in there. You can do ecommerce through Shopify, Squarespace, different platforms. So we found from like a user experience having ownership of your website making changes, Squarespace provides kind of the best piece for that because a business owner that doesn't have the time or knowledge to go in and hard code WordPress to change one term, can go into Squarespace and just make that adjustment very quickly. So there, again, I might be putting myself on the chopping block by saying Squarespace because then I'm not a traditional website designer. But I'm like, if you take the tools that are presented to you, and it's found effective, I mean, 95% of our clients are on Squarespace. And I can promise you that they're ranking very well across SEO, I mean that that medical billing company is a Squarespace website, and they got over a million like organic impressions, and we run all the PageSpeed scores, and they're their standard, if not a little bit above. So again, might be opening myself up to have someone yell at me. But I think in my opinion, I think Squarespace is a really viable option for a business.

Adam Liette
Absolutely. I haven't personally used Squarespace, I've used WordPress, and wrestled with WordPress, I realized when I'm not a website designer, that's what I found out when I

Caleb Roche
go in, I think like there's, you know, even like Wix, I don't think it's a, you know, terrible platform or whatever. But at the same time, the one piece that, you know, I always kind of say with that is, like Wix, like, we have a client that just switched over from Wix to Squarespace. Wix comes across as a cheap provider, they're quick and easy. But what they got frustrated on was Wix, you could do like, you could start your website, it was like 1415 bucks a month, well, then outside of that, you would have to do hosting plan, you'd have to get a hosting plan, an SSL certificate is, you know, an extra five bucks a month to actually use a domain, you have to be on their premium plan, which is like 50 bucks a month. So by the time that add ins come in, it's 100. plus dollars just for hosting. And even WordPress, or SquareSpace is like 20, to 25, that Max for everything that you would need. So you do have to be very cognizant of is the website builder that I'm using, because there's Drupal now, I mean, there's really good designers out like good design platforms out there that I haven't even used that I can't provide a recommendation on. But you have to just make sure that when I've designed and launched the site, am I looking at like $3,000 just for hosting fees? And maybe I look at something different investing those resources into something different. But that's all based on, you know, what works best for the consumer?

Adam Liette
And is that service gonna still be there in three years? Yes, exactly. To rebuild after doing all this work. I mean, there's a reason WordPress has been around for so long. I mean, it just,

Caleb Roche
well, I will say, like off of that comment, I will say the other piece of marketing that. And I would assume that you kind of have these conversations as well, kind of like from a leadership perspective. If you're hiring and training, bringing in like an operations expert, and you're having 10, different 10 different operations experts come in, within a three year period, your organization is going to be so disorganized because one person is going to do it, you're going to follow that and then the next expert is going to come in. So it's the same thing with marketing. Again, it's easy to get frustrated with marketing experts or make that wrong hire in people don't learn from their hires. And so they make one bad marketing consultant hire. And then they hire another bad one. And they don't learn the mistake. So by the time that they're three years in, they get, you know, nine to 10 different marketing companies that they've worked with that they've invested all of this money, and they have nothing to show for it. And so then they come to us, or companies that are, you know, focused around providing a great experience. And now they're like, they have these unrealistic unrealistic expectations, because, well, we've spent $50,000, with 10 different people, and we haven't seen results. So when we work with you, we expect to see results, which is completely unrealistic. And B, they don't have anything to show for it, which is very important. When you're working with a marketing consultant, whether you're doing like marketing internally, make sure that what you're building is sustainable for the long term. Obviously, you have to pivot. There's ways that you pivot, there's platforms you have to get off, you have to get on. But at the same time having an essential strategy helps you stay consistent with what you have and what you're building actually becomes an asset not just something that gets replaced.

Adam Liette
Hmm. And the other thing they get is they get jaded like they have unrealistic expectations and then they're super jaded. They they get those false beliefs of this doesn't work. That doesn't work. Well. No, it does. It just you had a really crappy guy trying to help you or there wasn't some that something wasn't connecting there and that's why people bring these unrealistic expectations and bad data to the table for sure. Sorry,

Caleb Roche
my my printer just started going off apologies for background noise. No, but I I this is live, guys. I mean, yeah, this is I mean, I just texted my wife and was like, Hey, can you not print and so I think I really think though that's, that's something really important on the marketing side is to really hone in just, it's not just about what I can offer what I can promise you because there's so much I mean, we could spend a whole podcast about the fake marketing gurus or the fake promises 99% of the fake promises have some sort of disclaimer that the guarantee that you're getting back is not a guarantee. And you have to, like I've seen outrageous ones where it's like, we will give you a money back guarantee, if you don't get 55 leads, you know, by by the first month, what they say is to qualify for the give the guarantee, you have to call them six times a day, for the entire 30 day like I've seen it some outrageous stuff. And so that's where the piece like you really have to look and say like, how is this actually working. And so that's the one kind of recommendation I would provide from a broad marketing perspective is everything that you're doing marketing wise is consumer based behavior, which is kind of comes back to that consumer insights. And while there are trends, while there are things that we've seen that work well for clients, if we deliver a creative, a beautifully creative creative, with perfect coffee, and the perfect offer, and I deliver that to the person and they're having a terrible day, they just got let go from their job, they, they just found out that they have to replace their age back unit that's $9,000, they have x, now you're in a different category, you've delivered it to that perfect person, and they're not going to buy it because it had some sort of external factor that has inhibited them from purchasing or deciding on that offer. So the one piece that I like to say on marketing is we have to look at changing our expectations from marketing. And looking at it from an investment standpoint, in the data versus just a how much business do I automatically get from this? Because you don't, I'm assuming I would hope. So I'm assuming you don't go to your financial advisor and say, I have $1,000 by end of year, I would like to make a million dollars, or even $10,000. I mean, $10,000 even sounds outrageous to most people, because you don't go to them and say, here's 1000, I need you to 10 times it by the end of the year. So

Adam Liette
let's do something illegal. But

Caleb Roche
let's not on this show show, you don't go to your financial advisor and say, I want you to text, tax my money and guarantee it. If a financial advisor guarantees me 10x On my return, I'm gonna think that they're probably money. Like, there's something sketchy about that. But what the illustration kind of brings in is, let's say that they they gave $1,000, during the COVID era to a financial advisor with the amount of money that grew during COVID. You know, I might have made that $10,000 without actually knowing that I made that $10,000. But then if I took that $1,000 and invested it now, based on the market, I'm probably losing money. And so one of the things with marketing is you have to think of it from an investment standpoint, whether you're a small business, and this is your last dollar, or that you're a corporation, and this is just a part of your budget, you have to look at what are we doing? How is this going to affect the bottom line of our operations, whether it leads to additional revenue, whether it leads to just brand recognition, brand exposure, like lift in marketplace, you know, additional market share, and we can't just look at the top line data and say, well, we've got a certain amount of leads, that's great. You see what I'm saying? So that's where we like to advise clients to shift their focus, and not become a cost leader and say, Well, we haven't seen any results. We've dumped $100,000 In we were expecting to get something but attribute value to specific marketing metrics, and hold your marketing metrics accountable, and be willing to shut them off if if something changes, but be in it for the long term investment is kind of what we like to tell people.

Adam Liette
And there's so many different ways we can track activities to purchases. I mean, if you're using any kind of customization, I've done this before, where I had the same offer, but I had like 10 different landing pages for it. So I could track the source. Yeah. So I could I could do that data analysis to figure out where everything was actually coming from. So I can know which brand which channels amplify which wants to put more emphasis on to well, we get we can talk about KPIs all day. But that this is an audio show doesn't work as well on audio is based on what you're seeing. Like, what what do you think some of the trends are going to be going forward? What's working now that might be shutting off? Or where, like, where's everything going?

Caleb Roche
I'm really interested on what this tick tock thing does, because we've seen so much growth from tick tock from different you know, you see all these creators that have basically built a brand which is incredible. I mean, I wish I had jumped on the trend. I mean, you see like, specifically here there's like a PE calm. Are you familiar with a company called PE calm? They're based in Oklahoma City. They're kind of a payroll management company. They have an actual employee that will it on Tik Tok and started doing videos. And she basically got promoted internally to do all their corporate marketing, like all their promotions. And so now she's basically monetized. She's still an employee, but she's monetized. So it's, it's just incredible. So the TIC tock thing has been so incredible to watch and see like how people have monetized. But the one thing that I'm interested on is do they continue to steam, or with all the recent news of the head of the FBI coming out, saying tiktoks needs to go away, there's so much data that's being collected on US citizen. So it'll be really fascinating to see where that tick tock trend goes for 2023. And whether that continues, and you know, becomes a really good piece. I will say, I do think from what we've seen across both b2c and b2b clients. LinkedIn is becoming a more dominant platform. Again, just in our opinion, from what we've seen, there's a lot of people getting more engaged on LinkedIn, there's a lot more job seekers out there looking for better opportunities. And so whether you're b2b or b2c client like company, I think it's really important to get established on LinkedIn, because if your service more like b2c clients, and maybe your buyers aren't on the marketplace on LinkedIn, but let's say you're hiring, it's a great platform to have an established recognition that people can see that and, you know, build a following based on that. So we're advising our clients to get a little bit more engaged on LinkedIn, and to really build that out. And what we're seeing as well as I do think there's going to be a shift across over the next two years, with all the election stuff coming up, I do think that there's going to be a shift in cost for advertising across both Google and Facebook, because I think there's going to be this is gonna be a very highly contested political, you know, environment for the next two years. And so I think there's going to be a lot of funds being thrown at ads based on the political side of things, which is going to drive up the cost for advertisers just in general. So not only with inflation, everything going up. But I do think that there is going to be a trendline, which is not a positive trend line for businesses, but a positive trend line towards additional adspend costs across like just standard advertising channels.

Adam Liette
I saw that during the 2000 elections, we, our CPM just kept going up kept going up, it's like okay, what I

Caleb Roche
do think we've gotten very spoiled out a very low CPM cost and even a low cost like conversion cost. And so I don't think as many companies are prepared, that they're expecting to keep their conversion value, and they're like, cost per 1000 impressions extremely low. And I don't think that they're prepared for even a five to $10 increase, especially with larger budgets, because your cost per action goes up dramatically based on that, even if you keep the same conversion cost, and are the same conversion value,

Adam Liette
which just bring this full circle back around the start of our conversation. This is where consumer behavior, and consumer insights becomes so valuable, because if your cost per acquisition is going up, reselling, and repeat, selling becomes even more valuable for your long term strategy, getting that customer for life, and continuing to serve them. Like it's, it's more and more critical, I think, now than ever. And we we've probably said that a million times in marketing, haven't we. But I think there's so much to be said for reselling, for getting customer loyalty. And whatever we can do to do that is going to be huge. And I've seen that on LinkedIn as well. What you said about LinkedIn becoming more important, I'm getting super high quality leads off LinkedIn. So I can I can attest to that as well. It's, it's fun again, it's weird.

Caleb Roche
It went from like, it seemed like it kind of was like a desert for a little bit. And then what happened was, it seemed like you got a lot of the fake gurus going on there and spilling out their heart. And then that actually transitioned to actually people having vulnerable honest communications on their on the organic platform that was like, Okay, we're back to the good side of LinkedIn. Like we're, we're on a very healthy side of things.

Adam Liette
are that are it's it's all of us, like, I'm over 30. So all of us 30 plus years are on Facebook last and now we're on LinkedIn, but we're still maybe LinkedIn like Facebook? I don't know. Yeah. That's fair. Oh, fantastic. Caleb, this has been amazing. I've really enjoyed nerding out with you. And we should definitely do this again. But where can our listeners find out more about the services you offer?

Caleb Roche
Yeah, so where you can just go to our website, it's C Reg, consulting, CRO ch e consulting.com. We have a lot of resources on there. And then we do have a no obligation 30 minute free strategy session. So we won't try to sell you on that. I mean, maybe we might, you know, who knows it's kind of a lottery system. Just kidding. We will not sell you on that. So what we try to do is just at least give your your business or your team kind of a direction that maybe you could go internally. And then if there are ways of opportunity or ways that we can help if that's expressed, we will go farther, but we like to keep that as kind of a help you build your business because what we've seen is the clients that we've really helped build their business and have worried more about their business and our business has come back into fold. And so we really like building businesses and giving more than we take. So we have that on our website. So if someone wants to check that out, someone wants to book a call, we'd love to, to kind of talk through what they're currently doing, and maybe some pivot or optimal upper optimization areas that they can they can build within their business.

Adam Liette
Fantastic and shameless plug for my end, like working with consultants has always, it's always worked really well for me, and stop trying to figure all this crap out for yourself, guys, there's plenty of smart people out there to help you. So definitely, the link will be in the show notes. And you can check out Caleb. Hi, brother. Thank you so much, man. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. And on one last thing. We both have MBAs, and I had done that that like, oh, maybe I'll go get a JD until I took my first business law class. And I'm like, Dude, this is terrible.

Caleb Roche
Well, and I was I was thankful enough to have my sister in law as an attorney. And so when I was going through undergraduate, she was actually at SMU law. And so she was like, really, really helpful to see like, she brought me to a class I was able to sit in and watch and my eyes were open to like, how different different the law side of things was, especially in like law school, like seeing how stressed she was. I was like, this is a like top student at undergrad top law school student and she is stressed to the max and I'm like a mid tier I am terrible at tests I'm okay at like studying. And I'm like, I'm not going to survive so it's not even worth spending 60 grand to try to get a JD when I'm not even pass. I think about the bar. So mad respect to attorneys out there though, seeing all everything going on. Because I mean, your first first couple years, it's like, you know, it's kind of like a big for consultant like you have no family life. You just basically work. And for me, thankfully, I realized that because I got very quickly into the family side of things. And I don't think my wife would appreciate if I had no family time. So

Adam Liette
for sure, awesome, brother. But sweet man. Well, we'll be in touch and thank you so much for joining us today. And yeah, guys, get on your marketing. It's gonna it's going to propel you forward and good luck and know that there plenty backs experts out there to help you. Alright, thanks, Caleb.

Caleb Roche
Thank you. Appreciate it. You too.