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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent Peterson (00:01.543)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Courtney Hurley and Kelly Evans who are sisters I just learned. Kelly and Courtney, Kelly start off, give us an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day to day role and what you're excited about for this year in business.
Kelly (00:08.206)
you
Kelly (00:16.846)
Oh boy, putting me on the spot. I am Kelly. I'm Courtney's older sister and wonderful. Courtney and I, so it's kind of cheesy to just jump into this, but somebody asked us through the day about screws and slados, our name. And it really is Courtney and I. One of us is working on something in the back end and the other person is doing the front end. And then we switch based on different skills and strengths. So Courtney's by far the best person I've ever met in my life with ads and SEO. I can get a good B plus and I had a really good day. do good job.
Courtney Hurley (00:22.494)
Yeah.
Kelly (00:46.294)
She crushes anybody. So that's Courtney's front end and everything. And I'll go on the back end and do whatever busy work and things she needs for that. And then vice versa when it to strategic development or website building or migration or automation, implementation, like effective tool usage and like setting up your stack lean and correctly is really where I am in the front of the pistol. And she's more on the back end supporting me. So.
It really is just a dynamic of a yin and yang. Every day is really different and it just depends on what projects we have, what clients we have, what we want to do in our lives. We both have kids and family and we take value in doing the amazing job with our clients, but also enjoying our family and our kids and stuff. So, and what's the other question? The best? I missed the other one.
Brent Peterson (01:34.311)
What's your what's your what's your excited about for business?
Kelly (01:38.418)
I'm excited about humans. I'm excited to get over the wave of the flood of everything you see. I get every tool and make it make it like bells and whistles to that. Also, wait, those muscles actually don't do anything unless something's following it and connecting it and getting back to literally the human element. Like, hi, how are you? What do you need help with? Look, let's address that rather than just trying to patch everything with a million different tools and things that are ultimately not doing it for you. And
You're just putting lipstick on a pig when really we want to get rid of the pig and actually make you and get what you need and get you set up and then think of like, like, and have a good time and let us know if you need anything in the future. That's what I want in business.
Brent Peterson (02:19.987)
Courtney, you're next.
Courtney Hurley (02:22.601)
All right. So I'm Courtney. I come from an agency role background, as Kelly mentioned. Thank you, Kelly. I primarily focus in SEO and ads, analytics. And then I also do training on peak performance and the neuroscience behind flow and how to increase your productivity 500%. So we really couple a lot of what we do for
Kelly (02:23.928)
you
Kelly (02:31.502)
Thank
Courtney Hurley (02:49.813)
busy, small, mid-sized business owners that are not only are they carrying many hats, but they also are high risk of burnout. So we not only make sure that they get the right foundation in place, train them up on what they need, but we also make sure we train them on the neuroscience behind flow and how to increase that productivity, how to tap intact to recovery and banish that burnout.
The thing I'm most excited for in business isn't just, it's the enablement of people, I would say. And the enablement of being able to gain your time back to use it for those things that matter most to you. And that is not just from a business perspective, but a personal perspective as well. And in doing so, being able to...
learn how to be more present and more efficient in both your work, your strategies, but also your home life. And I think something that we, because we really focus on all of our work on enablement and that comes into like the marketing trainings we do, the business trainings we do, as well as of course the neuroscience and stuff like that. We really are about like,
Again, coming from the agency world, I firsthand was a part of the handcuffing of people to to ensure those pipelines and making sure that they were reliant on us. And I just didn't align with that. And that's the biggest thing I'm most excited for is not even just enabling people to gain time back for their family and friends or for their health and fitness or for their business.
Kelly (04:17.102)
The robbery. The stray robbery.
Courtney Hurley (04:37.589)
but also enabling them with the tools, the insights, the knowledge, and the access to experts that can answer questions on the fly when they're just stuck with where they're at. So that way they can actually grow, pivot, and be agile in their business instead of constantly being stuck and trapped in these like overwhelm, bring on an agency, these loops of like high cost.
Lack of autonomy, lack of control, that sort of thing. So that would be what I'm most excited for. And as you can tell, I'm a little passionate about it.
Brent Peterson (05:11.731)
That's awesome. we're going to we did discuss in our green room that we took. We've already done a full episode just discussing what we're going to discuss. before we get into that, though, I know and we have a lot to talk about today. I'm going to tell you guys a joke. All you have to do is give me a rating eight through 13, and it's guaranteed guaranteed not to be funny. So I'm going to pre just I'm going to queue it up just like that. It might be funny. know, who knows? It's you know, everybody's different, right?
Kelly (05:12.135)
Neither one of us are at all.
Courtney Hurley (05:13.686)
Yeah
Kelly (05:35.982)
you
I hope I get it.
Brent Peterson (05:42.275)
you'll get, this is a good one. And I thought about kids when I had this joke. So here we go. My son made the mistake of telling me that I was being over dramatic. So I changed the wifi password. We'll see who's over dramatic in five minutes.
Kelly (05:54.67)
My kids would lose it. They would lose it. They would. No, I like that. All right, I'll give it an 11.
Courtney Hurley (05:58.293)
Ha!
Courtney Hurley (06:08.385)
was gonna give an 11 too.
Kelly (06:09.87)
We're so aligned
Brent Peterson (06:10.075)
All right, perfect. That's great. Yeah. Good. All right. Well, know, yeah.
Courtney Hurley (06:13.473)
I think that's great.
Kelly (06:15.862)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. can see my g- literally, I'm like, I- I don't know if it's- if it's a kids or Dan, I would actually be more upset, though.
Courtney Hurley (06:16.705)
The sassy one.
Courtney Hurley (06:24.214)
Yeah.
Brent Peterson (06:25.139)
I did an interview earlier. I'm going to say the joke again because I just want to consider with two people we have to tell two jokes and I know this is a double but this was particularly funny for me when I read it first. Here we go. In Athens, no one wakes up before noon. Dawn is tough on grease.
Kelly (06:33.666)
I'm in.
Kelly (06:42.062)
You
Brent Peterson (06:45.841)
I thought that was even better.
Kelly (06:46.926)
That's a horrible...not a horrible joke, it's a horrible like, oh my gosh. It did take me minutes to understand the grease part, then I came back at that. Not a joke.
Courtney Hurley (06:54.817)
Yeah, that one's, I feel like that's a more, if you're going for sophistication, that's like the 12.
Kelly (07:03.886)
I'm going 10 because I'm like, my feelings are a little hurt even though I have nothing to do, I'm not in freak, I'm nothing. It's just, like, well, it's done. Like, like, feel bad even though it's completely a joke. Those poor people.
Brent Peterson (07:16.211)
All right. Yeah, poor people. All right. So we started off before we started recording talking about just the use of AI and how AI is so prevalent in content generation. But people overlook it for pipelines, helping you do less work, right? So tell us about where you guys see AI now in the world of marketing and where you think it's going.
Kelly (07:39.148)
Thank
Courtney Hurley (07:46.571)
So I'll start, something that I would love to jump in and start out. And then I'm going to hand it over to Kelly because she is, we just had a very passionate, but the, thing that I've noticed is that people are so rel, it's, they're using AI for so much of the front facing components, the social media content, the website content.
Kelly (07:52.942)
Conversation about this topic today.
Kelly (08:13.538)
personality.
Courtney Hurley (08:15.273)
the blog content. Something I think that is being overused is they're using it one for one. They're pulling it straight from AI and leveraging it and putting it on their site. Now, actually what has been shown is that when you use those AI trigger terms like embark, like unlock, those types of things, you'll actually start to lose trust in your brand and in the value of your content.
Kelly (08:34.54)
Embrace journey.
Courtney Hurley (08:40.829)
What it's intended to be more of is a, yes, you can use it straight one for one, but not if you're building yourself a high quality reputable brand. You really want to use it as your brainstorming tool. Now it's great for that, but that's not actually where AI started from. And it's actually been around for a lot longer, but in various different realms in the backend. And I'm going to let Kelly dive into.
Kelly (09:04.974)
you
Courtney Hurley (09:08.331)
how people can leverage AI from a marketing perspective in their background to literally make their systems do all the hard work.
Kelly (09:17.582)
So yes, I will be very passionate about that, but I wanted to explain, cover one thing Courtney mentioned, that I think is a great example of how people need to look at content with AI. We did a blog series for a client last year and it was intentional that we, they're an agency in a different realm and we did, I think it was eight series and it was all on.
AI generated content. And the first thing we did, we said we were prompt and then we gave what AI produced. And then we analyzed what we like did. Like that was the first blog post. The second one was an iteration of more curated learnings on the prompt. And over eight blog posts, we had the AI generated and then our edited version of the content. And by the end of the eight series, the prompt got a lot better, but no matter what, if you looked at the AI generated one versus the human edited one, was anybody who looked at anybody who talked to you,
had a bunch of people pull, everybody picked out the robot immediately. And the most common reaction was they lost trust and they felt like they were being jipped or cheated or lied to because all of a sudden they're in the middle of reading this thing, really believing this perspective. And all of a sudden they're like, wait, this isn't a robot. This isn't Joe. This is a robot. they lose, they lost complete faith, don't trust anything and they leave. When, you took the version that is the...
edited version of an idea from AI, not one person felt that way. And they read it through and they pursed the article, the writer became a thought leader, became a trusted source for them. The robot, every single person who went through found the trigger words, the tone, the lengthy sentences and knew after a while they got caught into it. And they're all just like, wait, hold on, that's not it. And it completely showed this example that it was damaging to a brand.
for the learnings there was AI is a great thing to get when you're in a roadblock, you can't think something, you need ideas. Here, give me 10 ideas, what to do, but take that idea and make it your own in your voice. Cause the most valuable thing you have, your biggest differentiator is your personality, your brand personality, your individual personality, we're humans. We don't want to be friends and buy love robots. We want humans that we are. And that's what it really like brings the energy and the positivity is the human connection.
Kelly (11:33.262)
If you try to use a robot, you're not only going to miss those connections, but you're going to lose a lot of trust and a lot of opportunities because of that. And also everyone's using it. The same words, the same tone, the same keywords, the same trigger words are all being used. You're never going to rank an SEO now because everyone's using the same source. When if you did it, if you had your own, you would have a unique source. So the content use it as a resource to get started or to get you through a hump. Do not use it to write your content.
or you will get caught in a world backfire. On the other hand, use it a hundred thousand percent automation, integration, intelligent learnings, identifying things you aren't seeing or you don't have the time to see or you don't want to see use it. Anything you have, you have one, two, 10, 20, 30 tools. I don't care. You have 10 products versus 10 million. They all need to talk to each other. It's not like, it's not so complicated. It's literally just a web. Like if this is here, this needs to be here. And if I do this,
I need to share it. You have to have a centralized brain nervous system, a database that has all the information. You have to use it all, but it needs to all be there and to be able to be talking to each other. So it's building this learning. And then at some point you want to take a piece of the pie and you say, I want to identify this type of audience or this type of group or this type of product. It's all in there and it's connected to be able to intelligently give it back to you. But you also can use in the sense that it can predict things for you. can trigger things. if it says, if you have,
AI scoring, example, and you can say, here's my 10,000 most recent orders. And this is the best ones. Tell me what is consistent in the best ones and what are the characteristics, what's the history of these people? are the, they come from? Not just what source they came from and how much you paid from Google ads. What is it? You, what are the unique identifiers that you're not seeing just from a blinding Excel that it can go through and identify these things. Then use those learnings.
to improve upon your system to expand. can build your ads audience based off these learnings. Use it as your intelligence tool, which is what it's supposed to be doing. is artificial intelligence, not artificial content creation or artificial drawings. Because everyone knows that if you see a chat GBT image, you know that overlay and that tone that was touching between no matter what you do to it. But the other day you can use it to really be an analysis analytical,
Kelly (14:01.166)
trigger tool that can save you. We, one client we set up, we have identified really in detail there, the triggers for their ideal customer. Every morning they and our AI runs all through and they get an email that says, are the three best prospects of things that happen in your site. actions they did that you should go after today. They don't do anything. Every morning they get an email, three prospects of what it is. And it's all done based on what they told AI and AI is always learning based on further good sales.
You can refine things, say, don't go from people with this, don't come to these keywords. I don't want to be in this art market. And every day they get this list that they don't have to go through and comb or guess on. That's what AI is invaluable for. Keep going, but I will take a break.
Courtney Hurley (14:45.451)
Thank
Brent Peterson (14:45.649)
Yeah, that's all I mean, finding fighting passion patterns in data is what it's best at, right? And I think that so I'm I write personas for people and I'm I'll tell you what the first thing I put on is here's just a list of five things or six things in the ever evolving dot dot dot unlock game changing delve delving aim aim to in the world of ever evolving ever changing.
Courtney Hurley (14:51.211)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Hurley (15:10.752)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Peterson (15:13.299)
I think those are just, you're right, those are some key words now that people have really...
Kelly (15:15.438)
If you see a comma before the and, you know that a human did not do that unless they really are good at the grammar. You know that chat.gbt did that. If you see two asterisks, you know that it's a copy and paste directly. But it's the length of sentences. If you actually run chat.gbt's paragraphs through a, what is it, language level like scoring, it actually scores way too complex and way too high than the average consumer average reader, average browser. If you're looking to buy
You have an e-commerce site and you have the descriptions. If you put Chat TV Team, they're too overwhelming, they're too complicated. They don't actually drive any inspiration to say, really, oh my gosh, you read my mind. I need this now. Chat TV Team doesn't do that. Yeah. And thank you. And that's where the human is.
Courtney Hurley (15:54.591)
popping into the desires.
Brent Peterson (15:57.325)
I will admit that I use Grammarly and Grammarly puts the Oxford comma in all the time. I wish I could turn it off because it drives me crazy.
Courtney Hurley (16:04.836)
yeah.
Kelly (16:06.254)
It tells me to, but I don't always listen to it. I actually went to law school and grammarly, I learned to really respect grammarly because there's times you just don't even know when you could put in the law school grammar rules and the blue book and green book and then it'll follow those. I was like, oh, it really helped me also learn the rules because it was telling me when I was doing things wrong.
Courtney Hurley (16:08.991)
Hahaha
Brent Peterson (16:28.049)
Yeah, so Courtney, what's your take on that?
Courtney Hurley (16:32.801)
For AI automation, really, mean, when it comes to emails and workflows and all that stuff, I mean, we just had a client literally less than an hour ago that we were talking about this with. And there's the difference of like manually creating different drip campaigns, or you could do things where you actually only create five to seven templates.
And then based on those five to seven templates, you can have all sorts of dynamic variables that can go into place. You can have these templates be your written template, but then it's just import implementing those key call to actions or that you've pre-determined based on user behavior, like lead scoring, that sort of thing. The other area that we see it so powerful is in the data, the lead scoring data that
we're able to pass back into our ads. I mean, we have, I think, one of our clients that we spend over $2 million a year on their Google Ads, just their Google Ads alone, and they run other ads as well. Their ROAS, over one year, because of lead scoring, which is being able to rate
the level of the lead based on the number of interactions, the sales interactions, whether people open emails, the number of pages they looked at, whether they had a phone call, all those things, and being able to rate them up to a certain score and then saying, if their score is 50 or higher, tell Google ads and let's optimize towards that. So it's not only taking into account just the fact that a person booked a meeting, but we're optimizing towards just those 50 plus scored meetings.
Kelly (18:21.134)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Hurley (18:21.921)
As a result, it knows which ones of those booked meetings were poor meetings, but also which ones were great. this is what is the best thing about this is from that type of concept, we were able to increase their ROAS on their ads over 850 % in a year. And that's for company that's spending $2 million a year on their ads. So that's huge.
Kelly (18:46.958)
And what's huge is that it's not just about what Courtney's saying with the, this is the good meetings. It's telling you and telling the tool systems, the bad ones, the bad leads. So it came through and they filled out a form. Awesome. Now it's a good, it's a Then they booked a meeting. Amazing. They're going to meet with sales. Then sales had the meeting. Wow, this is gold. And then they put up, they send them a proposal and then the person went rogue or the person was a scam or the fact that he made all these steps. Suddenly it's good, good, gooder.
Great. Good I made up on purpose. And then you're going and saying, telling Google ads, go find so many more people like this. But guess what? It was a scam. was a spank. It was not a good lead. You want to go back and say, don't find people like this. And these are the behaviors I don't want. So don't, when you're going and finding good people, also have to tell the bad ones. People always clean their database of bad people. That's the worst thing you can do. Your database needs to have the good, bad, and indifferent. And you need to categorize and bucket and flag and identify the bad just as much as the good.
So you can tell your emails, can tell your text messaging, can tell your ads, anything. What is the bad that you don't want as well as the good. And sometimes the bad is more important. That's where, like Courtney was saying, where people really start to succeed is by getting rid of the bad. But you have to have those analysis, you have to flag them, have to be able to bucket them, identify them, and then communicate outwards without you.
going through every single person thing, whether they go to bed, putting it in Excel, uploading it somewhere. No, you need to have the system doing those learnings and sharing for you. So it's doing its job. And why are you paying these tools? Because mistake people have, they're starting to struggle, overwhelmed, drowning too many things. What they do, they go buy 10 more AI tools. And guess what? All 10 of those are just going to guarantee that you're going to fail because none of them are actually working for you. They may give you something here or there, but what they really need to do is take what you have.
do what you can't do or shouldn't be doing because you have a different job besides the marketing of it and telling you, coming back and giving you what is best for you, for you then then decide what to do to act on it. But those, that analytical mind is what is really the most valuable thing. And if you don't, if you only use it in one direction, then you're just, you're not taking advantage at all as to what's really going to make you succeed.
Brent Peterson (21:06.323)
I want to, I've used the word unpacked before AI. So I want to just go back and talk about, I want to make a comment. Yeah, used to, no, I used to actually delving too. listened to Rick Steves over the weekend and he said, I'm going to delve into Berlin or something. Right. You can't say any of those words. Anyways, so a comment on the learning before chat GPT, one of my biggest complaints about like Jasper and some of these other AI companies that were coming out at about the same time.
Kelly (21:12.302)
You did. The AI didn't invent it.
Kelly (21:20.576)
I said embark before, but I know I can't now.
Courtney Hurley (21:24.705)
You're good.
Brent Peterson (21:36.519)
was that the inability to tell them what didn't work. And I just remembered at the time, maybe three years ago, not being able to tell them, this sentence is terrible, don't ever give it to me again. And then the next time you'd put it into a prompt, they just give you the same bad sentence. So that part, but from the data side, I do wanna just hear about PMAX, and you're talking about Google Ads, and...
Kelly (21:40.118)
Mm-hmm
Kelly (21:53.4)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Hurley (21:54.241)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Peterson (22:03.763)
The number one thing that I've learned from Google is that they just want you to spend more money. And they're a little optimistic. Because I don't have any big clients. optimizing means increase your budget by seven times, and you're going to get more sales. tell us, I'm assuming you're using tools outside of Google's own performance algorithm, or at least to help you learn more. Because I feel like Google is definitely slanted towards just spending more money.
Kelly (22:11.438)
Thank
Courtney Hurley (22:33.363)
Okay. So Google, I actually do host whole workshops on just Google ads, ROI, like increasing conversions and ROI. and the thing is Google has on its face on its, initial foundational settings essentially for your ads. Google absolutely sets themselves up for maximum spend. They make sure your broad match keyword.
Kelly (22:33.646)
you
Kelly (22:39.054)
you
Courtney Hurley (23:02.777)
a little radio button is set to on. So all your keywords automatically go to broad match, which means you're just going to fly through your budget. They want you to turn on these auto apply settings for them to be able to add more keywords. And then you have to keep increasing spend. There's so many ways though, that you can, if you just know how to use it, where I actually, as much as you might think that I use all these other tools to make my Google ads smarter.
At least 70 or 80 % of what I do to make our ads smarter is done in platform. so there's all sorts of features. There's the settings to make sure that like in the, you're a smaller budget, making sure you turn off the search network and Google partner network, there's under content, there's like content suitability and it's being able to block your ads from being able to show up alongside other types of content. like.
Kelly (23:36.322)
It's restricting Google Ads, which she does so well.
Courtney Hurley (24:01.185)
let's say religion or showing up on park domains, which is just a waste of your money because it's just an empty domain on certain types of websites, that sort of thing, like where you would show up next to it. There's a lot of features from that perspective that you can do. You can also set it up so that way it's like you want to test it first, but set up the ad scheduling. So it only shows for certain period, days of the hours. mean, one client that is more of a baby brand company, I mean,
they actually are someone who does want to run ads from 1 a.m. to 4 p.m. or 1 a.m. to 4a.m. because they're up scrolling while they're just nursing a baby and trying to put it back down, but it's their way to stay awake. And there's actually a huge increase in impulse buying during that time. Whereas most of our other clients, we do testing first and find out that those are dead hours. So you just don't run ads during that time. So there's all sorts of ways that you can tweak it within. And then what you can also do,
Kelly (24:34.414)
My name before I am. Because this is their gold mine.
Courtney Hurley (24:59.039)
is you can take your campaigns and like campaigns, let's say it's maximized conversions, you can bucket them together under shared budgets and allow the algorithm to allocate the money towards whichever campaign is performing better. Then you can also bucket them together under portfolio bid strategies to get them to share data so that way all your campaigns are learning from each other faster. And so there's a ton of things that can be done within ads that make it
more efficient so that way when it gets to a point that you do want to scale, you are at maximum ROI. And something that actually is very much overlooked, and I will touch on the HubSpot component as well, is SEO's impact. So one of our clients in particular was running ads and she had, I think it was a 3.75 ROI on her, like ROAS, return on ad spend on her Google ads. We took a look at her SEO.
And for her e-comm product, you typed in her exact product name and her brand name and a competitor showed up not only in the search results, image results as well. So we told her to pause ads, stop everything. We're going to go, let's fix your foundation. We got her SEO where it needed to be, trained her up on how to run that. Then we turned back on our ads and that same ad.
Kelly (25:58.318)
Thank
Kelly (26:06.35)
She didn't show up at all. She's done.
Courtney Hurley (26:23.745)
those same campaigns at the same spend, we went from a 3.75 to an 11.8 ROAS, meaning her $28,000 she was originally getting on her $8,000 she spent every month was now closer to $98,000 that she got on that same 8,000. So what people don't understand with SEO and the impact of SEO on ads is that you also are paying a higher cost per click even
compared to your competitor who might be in the same position or lower because of your quality score and your SEO trust factor. So these things all go into play and then comes the outside tools. And that's how you can make it even more efficient. And that's where we do lead scoring or we do custom events and all this stuff is being fed directly in from either Google Analytics or HubSpot or another platform. And we can have it all fed in so that way on a conversion level on an optimizing towards
conversion value or maximizing conversions, we're able to optimize more efficiently. But the first thing you need to do is make sure that core foundation of your ad setup and of your SEO and everything like that is in place to then be able to more efficiently optimize for those other things.
Kelly (27:37.13)
It's an important thing that people don't think about is that exactly with Courtney said 100 % right, but what you come down to is you just because you got more clicks, it doesn't mean that your conversion is like the ultimate issue. Those clicks, if Google sees that they're sending you twice as many clicks, but nobody's converting, they're going to know that where you're sending these people is not the right match. It's not a good match. And then they're going to be more critical or scrutinize more.
And if they find that this performance is user experience is not what the person wanted, they're going to charge more to every click. So not only are you going to be paying, you're paying for clicks that are not actually converting to anything, but you're going from a $2 to a $3 or $4 click, making the numbers up only because your SEO and your experience on the other end is so poor that they're saying they're not even worth it. If you're going to keep spending the money though, then we'll keep sending them. But your competitor who's actually the landing pages, the SEO is good. It's good experience.
They're gonna be paying a dollar and they're gonna be buying your words but the actual user is getting what they want and the SEO matches and it sounds silly but the words in the ad need to match the page not word-for-word but they have to be on the same otherwise it's a disconnect and that you're gonna be paying more money for that people don't realize it your ads just don't need to like Like promise the moon if your website's not promising the moon like you have to have them talk to each other and it's not worth spending more money
If you're going to ultimately not have the people get what they want and you're to be charging a premium for it, you might as well just stop, make it do the free work of the SEO to make it better and try to improve the user experience landing page. But that's not really necessary at that point. It's fix the SEO, then turn them on, the ads on, then let the users tell you what you need to improve on your landing page and listen to them for those improvements. The SEO you got to do first though, before you let the user tell you anything because
Otherwise they're going be sending the mismatched pages and stuff and you'll be paying too much money for it.
Brent Peterson (29:36.251)
Geez, we've already gone through our 20 minutes. I knew we'd have plenty to talk about today. So what do you see as the number, what would be the first thing that new companies or companies that come to you should look at when they're talking about the content on their site, the SEO on their site? You had already mentioned that, maybe you shouldn't run ads until your site is strong, at least to SEO standpoint.
Kelly (29:40.686)
you
Brent Peterson (30:02.68)
What's what is give a punch list of what people should be looking at?
Kelly (30:07.694)
I can tell you the number one thing on my end is look at your tools and we do a tools audit. If you have more than three tools, then you're never going to be able to succeed and move the needle and make and become profitable and not burn out. If you have four, five, six, 10 tools, and I'm counting like social media platform tools and different analytics tools, those tools are just going to bleed you out. you know, the crazy thing people don't realize is every single one of those subscriptions cost maybe $10, maybe $100, maybe...
$50 every month and over the course of the year that all adds up very quickly But none of them are doing their job if you have the all these different systems that are not talking to each other so if you have more than three tools you do an actual audit of everything from email platforms to Back end CRM's just those me every single one of them and then look most likely you're gonna end at 12 15 is where we usually see people and then you need to figure out what is the three tools you need number one and they can be the same one needs to be a
an actual nervous system database that had just hosts and reads and understands your data. Just has to, you have to have some, all your communications in one place. Do not have your orders in Shopify and your contacts and HubSpot and your emails in MailChimp and think that you're going to succeed. You have to have one place carry that all. So you have to get all the information from MailChimp into HubSpot. You have to get all the information from Shop.by into HubSpot, have HubSpot, have all that stuff. You can have those other systems, but that has to be your brain. And then,
You need to figure out which social media or marketing tool is the most important needle move review. And it's one, it is not three. It's not Twitter and everything else. Just because people like TikTok does not mean you're going to work on TikTok. Pick one, get rid of the others for now. Start with one and own that and succeed in that. You can always have that clone and share the information elsewhere. And then number three is, is really what do you need? And is it an internal, like is it an internal emails or workshop or
whatever tool you need to be able to succeed in your own realm. And that has to be able to, again, communicate with it, but anything beyond that, you don't need them. Emails all can come from the same system that your social media gets managed and your website lives in and your contact databases. You just need to find the right one for you and get, and just be okay with breaking up with the rest because it's going to save you so much money. It guarantees less money off of that, but the time and the energy and then
Kelly (32:29.452)
The whole entire point of why we have all these AI tools is they can do the work for you. If you let them, you are the biggest thing in the way. You just don't have them giving them the resources so they can actually do the work. So that is number one across the board.
Courtney Hurley (32:44.705)
Real quick, can you guys hear okay? Are you hearing this background noise? Okay, give me one sec. Let me try get them to stop it. So that's why I've been a little quiet. Hold on.
Kelly (32:48.469)
Yeah, I do hear the background. What's going on?
Brent Peterson (32:55.683)
So Kelly, you know, I think one thing to look at, and I like that approach too, like for HubSpot, and I am a HubSpot user, if you're not, if you can't afford the marketing suite, then you do have to have a, you should have a separate social platform. So you're saying that's one of your tools, right? Cause
Kelly (33:12.221)
So no, people don't get in HubSpot. Go to their pricing page, the free one, click on free and under free is the starter thing and it starts at $15 a month. You can have a website, emails and all the basics that you need for $15 a month. If you go over 2000 contacts, you'd pay a little more. If you want bells and whistles, you can pay a little more. Don't let anybody in the universe tell you that you need to have pro and enterprise and, or you do all of them. You need starter and everything. And then if you find something like if you Shopify, you probably want to go pro with, um,
probably the marketing one because you want to have all the information, every order, every product in Shopify to be communicated in. And every time someone does something, that information is learning and acting and you can, trigger your emails. can trigger your learnings. can, it can tell you when your descriptions are missing something and it can do a lot of the learnings and education for you that you'll need something that's more than $15. You're probably going to pay 300 a month. That's where you max out. Unless you're a big company, you don't go above that.
go to an agency or HubSpot, they're going to sell you the moon, but you don't need the moon. You literally need to be back on earth and have the foundation. so it's often when move people, like we just launched a website last week. We, they had so many different tools. We launched them on HubSpot for $15 a month, move the website. They have their forms going, their automatic emails. They're getting all these leads in, they're paying $15 a month. And then when they're doing some outbound mailing and stuff, then in a few months, we're going to increase one of the hubs up.
so that they can get more features that they don't need right now. So just get what you need. You can tomorrow add something, but you don't need it today. So just start with the basics.
Brent Peterson (34:48.595)
Perfect. Courtney.
Kelly (34:49.454)
Don't spend more than $300 a month. you don't have a critical need, I guarantee you that $300 a month is the maximum you're going to need to And most of the time, $15 is all you need.
Kelly (35:04.376)
Courtney, you okay? All right. So he was just asking about the pricing and stuff like that. And that's actually one of biggest issues we have with people is that it's actually not inexpensive, unaffordable things if you just look at it correctly.
Brent Peterson (35:04.499)
Courtney?
Courtney Hurley (35:05.665)
Okay, yeah, I'm here. I'm back.
Brent Peterson (35:19.591)
I'm just gonna give you a tiny bit on the marketing hub, because again, I'm a HubSpot user. And to go from your starter to pro is $870 difference.
Kelly (35:30.478)
No, that's no, that's not no, that's Martin. So that's a package bundle. They're trying to give you I invite them all the time because we have like 30 clients on there and we negotiate all of our client stuff. Maybe take this off the court. But they that's pretty their sales are getting the best benefit right now from that bundle. And they're actually selling you marketing and content together. And they're saying this is a great deal. You don't need you can just get marketing hub alone for the 300. And then you can then you just want to focus on having your marketing contacts only be the people.
that you're actively marketing that month. If you're not emailing that person this month, put it as non-marketing. could have 15 million people for free. You pay only for the marketing context. And all you do is set up one workflow and say, this person's actually being emailed, then put it in marketing context. If they bounce, if they unsubscribe, if they don't open five emails, move them to non-marketing. And then your numbers will always stay fresh with who you're actually marketing that month. And you have all the learnings from reals. They have non-marketing people. go to the website, they go to social media, they go to...
anything they do, you're still getting tracked. You're still getting all the information on it, but you're not paying for them. The only thing you're paying for is the active outbound initiated like intelligent reaction, which is the marketing context. you don't, and not most of the time it's like a 10th of the context people actually have in there.
But if you ever need negotiation, can tell you I've fought that battle up and down anytime.
Courtney Hurley (36:50.36)
She asked.
Brent Peterson (36:54.131)
So we're just talking about what you think people should be looking at this coming year, Courtney.
Courtney Hurley (37:00.755)
Okay, so in terms of, are we talking business or SEO?
Brent Peterson (37:08.637)
Billet stock business in general.
Courtney Hurley (37:10.653)
Okay, I think something that we're going to see a little bit more of a shift towards, and we already are seeing that shift, is towards a lot more basic human interaction as almost
Kelly (37:15.438)
Okay.
Courtney Hurley (37:30.849)
Not glorified, but it's almost like that special service that people are looking for. I think we're already seeing the fatigue of everything being automated systems. And I think something that's really gonna start differentiating companies are those companies that are able to offer the human to interact with and not just a chat bot or an email automation. mean,
We've seen in recent years how phone numbers have disappeared from websites because people don't want them calling. And now the person behind the chat's been replaced with no longer even a VA overseas, but now it's just a bot. And ultimately, you're losing connection more and more, which is causing people to crave it more and more. And something that we've seen firsthand is how much
Kelly (38:05.429)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Hurley (38:27.723)
people come to us and they stay with us even when we're like, you got this, you can do this on your own. They're like, but we want to work with you. We like this. We like the dynamic. We like personality. We like the people and it's people are starting to crave more and more of that. And that's really what's going to differentiate these top tiers, high paying customer clients and businesses versus
Kelly (38:37.038)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Hurley (38:54.485)
those commodity type businesses, which are going to be the ones that get away with just the automation. But if you really want to set yourself apart, you need to bring the human back into it. something that, a simple way that we've even seen this is we stopped doing for our own clients, we did a test on marketing emails that we sent to our own clients. We had like the more,
stylized, like email you would expect from big brands, that sort of thing. And we said, you know what, with everyone wanting more personalized interaction, we're gonna switch. And instead I started doing more or less letters from me of,
big learnings that we've had from our experiences along the way. And we do, for every one where we're maybe talking about a workshop, we'll do a couple of these emails in between. And so what we did as a test was we used an email last month and an email this month. And we have, it is the exact same email. Nothing changed on it. We sent it last month.
It had a 23 % open rate and maybe like it was a low 0.5 % click rate. We didn't do anything much leading up to it. It was just the marketing thing. Then what we did is we put in the optimal strategy for creating connection at this point. And what happened was in doing these more simple letters from me to people are
Email open rate for that exact same email in one month went from a 23 to a 58 % and that click through it went from a 0.5 to a 27%. And we changed nothing about that email. It just is that trust that was built because we provided them on a personal level, real value in between. And that's the kind of thing that's really going to differentiate brands, especially in these very,
Courtney Hurley (40:53.395)
over saturated spaces like email, like ads, like calls, like freebies, like instead of just all these lead magnets, get a human on the other side and let them talk to a real human and get real feedback and real advice. And I think that's going to be the biggest thing that I'm excited for over the next year is bringing that human back in and helping people really get to where they want to be as a result of it.
And the last thing I'll add on that is like Something that has resonated really well with our clients is that outside of our general consulting one-on-one hours, we've also added in something called office hours where they can just book 15 minutes with one of our experts to just get a question that they have handled now by someone with real experience and expert and not just chat GPT that's going to give you.
some generalized answer that might not actually be on point with what your business actually needs. So things like that, think about ways that you can incorporate the human back into your business. And I think that that's where you will really differentiate yourself and succeed.
Brent Peterson (42:00.157)
Yeah, getting out of the bot call tree is the new nightmare I think everybody gets into. And how do you get to a human?
Courtney Hurley (42:07.285)
Mm-hmm.
Kelly (42:08.11)
can't even order on Amazon. so frustrated at this point. I don't know the last time I found a human there. I feel like I avoid them at all costs because I can't get what I need. I can't get help. If I have a return, it literally is the bait of my existence. it's like a few years ago, that was my go-to. The automation levels, it's too much and it really burns people out. it's amazing how when people come to us and we talk and they say, go through the things and we basically say like,
Courtney Hurley (42:20.98)
Yeah
Kelly (42:34.894)
a lot of times cut out all the noise and then let's do this, this, and this. And they're like, wait, it's so much easier. You just actually have another human. You fight out what it is, you solve that problem and you move on and you don't fall into the trap of all the noise out there. You have to wear blinders because if you, the world is so intelligent at targeting and marketing and analyzing and intelligently identifying you that you're constantly target. You're constantly being trying to do so you're constantly being like,
Convinced to do things and it's and you feel like all this pressure because well this tells me it's best thing ever It's just trust me that robot is learning really well what you need and want to tell you but you don't actually need it I promise you and it's really hard to just say no I don't need any of stuff and eventually if there's something you really need you're going to figure that out and you're going to be able to get it but Today we don't robots telling you you need it That's not what you the last thing you need get rid of it like just avoid it because it's just doing a really good job at its job
Brent Peterson (43:31.613)
Yeah, they're learning to sell to us. And I think the end of the day, we're always gonna write content and we're gonna do marketing to sell to humans, not to other robots.
Kelly (43:40.099)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Hurley (43:40.191)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Brent Peterson (43:42.641)
Alright, so Kelly and Courtney, we are out of time. At the very end of the episode, I give everybody chance to do a shameless plug. You guys are gonna have to do a shameless plug together. And yeah, go for it.
Kelly (43:50.744)
Courtney, you're up.
Courtney Hurley (43:55.713)
All right, well, if you are looking for help on increasing your productivity and learning how to take that marketing back in-house, automating the shit out of it so you can actually have your marketing do the heavy lifting for you and you can focus on those things that really matter for your brand, then you can go ahead and find us on MarketLikeACMO.com and book a call on MarketLikeACMO.com slash workshop and we would love to chat with you. We'll give you an hour to.
Come with your biggest problem and we will help find a solution.
Brent Peterson (44:28.253)
That's perfect. I'll make sure I get all those into the show notes and maybe the title should be market the shit out of it for our episode. Yeah.
Courtney Hurley (44:33.857)
Ha!
Kelly (44:34.67)
I love it. I love it. But really, it's so funny because everyone thinks marketing became everyone's business. But no, marketing is one tool to help your business. Your business is whatever you do. And that's where you need to be. Marketing needs to do its job and then inform you effectively and not become your job. And that's where businesses fail. They bleed out. They just can't move. They fall into the trap of what marketing is an action that's supposed to be. It's supposed to be a resource, not
Bane of your existence.
Brent Peterson (45:07.251)
All right, Kelly and Courtney, it's been such a great conversation today. Thank you so much for being here.
Kelly (45:13.528)
Go enjoy the beach.