Craig Jacobson – Open Spaces Marketing
Craig is a true professional and I admire and appreciate his expertise. Over the last three years I got to know many online “experts”, but he belongs to the top 1% because he knows what he is talking about and what is important to grow your business using the internet, especially if you are a brick and mortar or a person business like us (personal matching of international Nanny’s/AuPairs with US Families).His ability to explain to the difficult and complex concepts to make it easy for a newbie in marketing (like me) helped me to learn quickly and efficiently what I needed to make an educated decision on what strategy to follow, what do do myself and what to outsource.
His focus on the big picture of marketing strategy AND his skills and knowledge about online automation and word press AND resources (developers, copy writers, video, and combining it with the power of Infusionsoft application) to get things done is freedom I was longing for.
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Shoan 0:01
Hello, and welcome to automation rehab. My name is Shoan. I’m the founder and the voice of automation rehab. And today we have Craig Jacobson on the line. But first a word from our sponsor. Okay, so then I’m going to edit this part out. But then open spaces, marketing is going to be the sponsor. So it’s going to have this intro that I’m going to say that, and then I’m going to read something off your website. Okay. Like, like you’re sponsoring this. So people that listen think that I have sponsors. Cool, what the hell, you know? And then because eventually I will have sponsors. Good. Yeah. And then, I mean, paint sponsors, and then we’re going to go into box out or not, but open spaces marketing, and then we’ll go back in. So here we go. Okay. Hello, Craig Jacobson. Welcome to the podcast. Great to have you
Craig 0:54
on. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Shoan.
Maybe Infusionsoft could help with that 1:42
Well, it was like kind of an accident I needed, I needed to learn about better marketing for my business I had I had, and I still have a medical manufacturing business. And, and so I needed to figure out how to be able to talk to different stories, different subgroups of people. And so at a lunch meeting, somebody told me about, because I knew about general website and general website marketing and pay per click and such. But I didn’t know about Infusionsoft. But sort of second generation, marketing automation. I learned about that somebody had a lunch told me about it. And I said to him, how many different campaigns are you running at the same time, and he said, He’s running three campaigns with himself, his wife, and an intern. And I had a full time person, and we’re having trouble managing three different campaigns to three different customer groups for for our medical business. It’s like, Oh, well, maybe Infusionsoft could help with that. Yeah, different who different message different offer, you know, times times a couple. So I, I bet that that brought me into it. So there’s a guy Steve Moran that introduced that to me and told me about this secret was this more powerful marketing tool, open space, or excuse me, Infusionsoft. And so I went and bought Infusionsoft installed it in my business, put it in five other businesses. At the end of that they said, you know, the this training program, you can become an infusion, soft certified, you know, consultant was like, Okay, I’ll do that, because I’ve done this five times already would be nice to now read the manual. And I went to their training, and, but but the, I guess the big push was, I was getting bored running my medical business, my manufacturing business, my wife said, you light up, when you’re spending time solving people’s problems, and you help this business grow from nothing to $5 million, you help this one grow from nothing to $10 million. You’d like to spend your time doing that. Why don’t you Why don’t you charge people for that, I was like, Oh, I don’t really want to do that. I mean, I want to do the work. But I don’t actually want to be a consultant because I think this thing that consultants, consultants, mostly are not very sharp. And, but they didn’t deliver a lot of value to me in the past, or the ones that I had encountered. So uh, so I had a negative impression of consultants. But I at that point, I liked the work enough, because I liked setting up marketing and growing small businesses and observing people becoming financially independent and, and letting their realizing their dreams that’s so addictive, that, you know, changing people’s lives in that creating a good business good marketing system does.
Continuously market 13:49
Well, that routinely happens with little businesses that are like his business business, we would he would some days, okay, some days, he would go into a shop because of kind of a shopkeeper mentality, go into a shop and open up at eight in the morning. And so the heat there is this long term tendency. Or by the way, just remember, the fourth thing we did is we set up the dashboards, we said measurement, yes, Google Analytics, we hooked up infusion soft dashboard, an external dashboard that shows us the number of new leads that we have, the number of prospects that we have number sales that we had. And so we could observe what we were doing. And then we did like a little bit of pay per click, but not much, right. And there was the dashboard. The dashboard was important thing that we used to focus our activity, but there’s this long term tendency that he’s overwhelmed, he’s got too much work, he’s behind and everything’s got no extra time. And so then he doesn’t want to spend time on marketing. And so then the business, it slows down, and then his life returns to normal. And just about the time that he’s at the bottom of the trough, he says, Let’s start marketing again. So then then it goes back up. And he was doing this up and down, up and down for a couple of years. Until we said, you have to figure out you have to sort out your, your fulfillment. So let’s just continuously because that because a business could grow and ultimately, you know, grew four, four times larger than it originally was. But the key to that was we continuously marketing, even when you were really busy. And so the marketing activity didn’t didn’t require the business owner, because I already had the videos and the Can we just expose more people to those, and then the business, you know, continue to get more leads. And so it’d be in the morning, you would go to the shop at eight in the morning, there’s three people standing in line waiting for him to be there. It’s like oh, my gosh, like, this is amazing. I’ve never had 30 years. But that was the key to consistently marketing, even even during the time is that we’re you’re fully stressed on fulfillment, because this this up and down cycle is the problem that those little businesses have. Because their constraint is the amount of working capital, the amount of inventory they have, the amount of space that they have, they only reassure them that so big, they only have a certain number of exam rooms, get the initial exams for people or whatever. But so so for local businesses, they have to escape if they become a growth business, if to find a way to deal to find that constraint and escape from that, that constraint for fulfillment, because you get continuously market and then and then the business can grow. That that was a key to this, you know, during growth, even in my medical business, because I’m also guilty, I’ve done this with my medical business up and down. But my wife, you know what, when the business is growing like crazy, I’m spending a lot of time on, I’ve got no money. And my wife is like how can we not taking any money out of the business like pretty takes them out. But it sounds like it’s really going well, it is going well. But all the money, the working capital is in the business. And so I don’t have much money for me to come on. But when the business slows down, then it sheds dollars and the cash cycle. And so you got to figure out the cash cycle for the business to be able to and then the amount of working capital that’s in it to be able to figure out how to navigate this and to escape this, this, this routine up and down.
Spend $1 in advertising, I make $4 in revenue 21:54
I do. But you know, they they there’s a bunch of people that own businesses that don’t understand how to run a business. The apps, if they’re coachable, they’re they’re good people to have as clients. if they’ll listen and think differently than then they can actually create something which is really good. But but they they’re going to adapt and change and understand. Because I believe that when you’re building a marketing campaign, there’s two phases of the learning phase. When we build out content, there’s new audience that’s exposed to a new set of messages. And we see if those messages create engagement, and then ultimately create customers. And so that’s, that’s during the learning phase two, find out which messages in which audiences create the best leads. And then after learning, then you scale because you figured out of the five things that you tried are the three things you tried, this is the best, this is the second best. So I spend an hour in advertising and make $1 here, I get my dollar back on this campaign. That’s that’s a good campaign. But I spend $1, in advertising, I make $4 in revenue, that’s a good campaign. That’s a baseline production campaign. If I spend $1, to make $15, that’s it’s an absolute hero one. And we definitely try to try to work on that one first, to scale the business. So be set up proper measurement measurement, turns into the dashboard and the dashboard and turns into the choice of what we’re choosing to work on. Because, you know, we’ll build a funnel, which is a funnel is an audience, a message and an offer.
Psychological researcher that’s gotten the Nobel Prize 27:08
Because most people that are listening, they’ve got a small business, the problem is that they’re talking around the nouns that they’re talking around the discussion when I have a product or service that does this, right prospects don’t actually understand what that means. So what they have to do is emotional eyes of what’s in it for me, and you can emotional eyes a lot of different ways. So you can tell the story around greed that will make you money slot, or the easy to use product pride, but I just use the example of the seven deadly sins, lust, you can have the lowest storage unit better guys are better girls, if you use this product or use the service, gluttony, my favorite. I like pride and gluttony, I get those, I don’t understand revenge, which is race. And I don’t use lust very often not very good at that in the marketing systems. But being able to because people make decisions emotionally and they justify irrationally. That is a fact. It is proven by all the psychologists like if you listen to Daniel cannon, who is a book that he has got this book Thinking Fast and Slow. That’s one of the great books, it’s not a marketing book, but it’s all about how people make decisions. So it is a marketing book. But it’s not written by marketer. He’s a psychological researcher that’s gotten the Nobel Prize for creating what is essentially behavioral economics, which is pertinent to what marketers care about. We’re telling stories and making money. So it’s behavioral, trying to modify people’s behaviors and making money from it. That’s that’s kind of what we do.
Software that we created 35:52
emotion I do we what we do is we we take a look at you put in words, you know, you cut and paste and put them in and already scraped the words from a website and then put them in in the in the software and shows us the amount of anxiety hostility words. Which which are the anxiety words, which nasty words, which are the confidence words, which are the depression words, and what’s your happiness words? And what are the confidence words, because I think that the good interesting content is like sweet sour sauce. And it’s got some some anxiety and it’s got some hope for the future. Because you’re talking about the problem. And you’re talking about the when the problem is gone, that the feature afterwards, that that’s good content in web marketing. And so that software that we created, I have with a partner, Dr. David Fogle, and it’s called effect check, effect, check calm. And so you can affect EFFECT, check ch ec k.com. So you can analyze the emotionality evoked by the words, because that’s what you’re doing. When when you’re delivering a message marketing message, you revoking emotions, and people, because emotions will help people make decisions because they make decisions emotionally, they won’t make it off of, of what you think it’s how you feel, right. And so when I’m analyzing content, this is just a little little tip for anybody. What I would look at is, what are the nouns? What are they talking about? And then how are they talking about it, which is the tone. And the tone is more important than the topic?
Set up your experiments 43:20
Yeah, I believe in the you always go through a learning phase. That’s your first base theory of the customer and their journey. And the new theory of the great kind of content that you should be building and the right kind of tech assets that you have to be building. But you go get that out there. And then you wet that with a with a few thousand people, a few hundred people to go hit the pages, go see if they want to dance the way that we’ve designed the dance to go. And then inevitably, we make changes that hopefully are improvements. But huge, I believe there’s two phases where you’re learning and then you’re earning. Once you figured it out, then you can scale then you can know that I can spend $1 over here. And customers will behave like this, they will dance through that funnel that way. So I can spend $1 make $3 back or $4 back, that’s my first level that I’m looking for my second level spend $1 and make $10. those are those are hard to figure out. So you got to set up your experiments to learn different things about customers that which messages to they respond to what times are important to you, if you’re really trying to figure out in the beginning, is who are the right people? What’s the what are the right messages to capture lead to create engagement and create a sale? Three messages, they have to be sorted out? And then what are the best times for for capturing leads and for sales?
Do that at the critical moment 51:58
I don’t want to sell one I most important item first, after I offer an upsell or down sell it another product that people bought this good This goes with, I want to get that first transaction done before a complicated with adding another thing into the card is if I then I usually start to see an increase in revenue in the business by simplifying it. Because in an order form, I can describe the product, I can talk about the benefits and what’s included. And then I have a couple testimonials for three testimonials of people saying good things about a product, big guarantee explanation. And then you have the credit card information in the button. And then there’s a form of a good order form. They should, it should not just be descriptive. But it’s also talked about the benefits. In shopping carts, there’s no most cases, there’s not enough room for enough words, if they don’t get laid out in a very good way to be able to be persuasive to be able to talk about the product, here’s what you get here the benefits, you need to talk about benefits. And so many people forget to do that at the critical moment. When they got there, they’re sitting there getting their credit for that I need to remind them that benefits, there’s the transaction, minimize the shopping cart abandons because it’s using an order form is is one of my favorite tactics for that, because you usually convert more revenue, because you’re not losing them through the additional steps, right. And then they think I’m just going to get Amazon and buy it.
Do the strategy and figure out the traffic 56:42
but I think I’ve built a business that’s focused on giving people advice. That’s what we do. I do marketing, consulting, and project management, my partner does copywriting, I do the strategy and figure out the traffic and the things we’re going to, we’re going to go do to grow the business. And I’m monitor are we making improvements. But I that that is disconnected from my passion, which is cancer support groups helping people that helping me, okay, somebody like me, that is an early stage is now I am seven months post treatment. There’s people that go to a local cancer support group that I go to, but they’re just one month or two months post treatment, and I’ve learned things over the last six months, that may or may not be beneficial for them. So that they they know to think about those things.
Know their team infrastructure 1:01:46
And my process is people consume information, your website and take your quiz. And then at the end of the quiz, then we have an appointment to talk to them I hate know, like, what local project is, what their, what their problems are, what their team orientation is where they they have a bunch of employees that are working in marketing or not. Because I work with some big companies and work with small companies. And I want to know their team infrastructure and know who their customers are, who their competitors are, at what stage they’re at, then we can decide, you know, if we’re suitable fit for that, that customer.
Open Spaces Marketing 1:02:20
Alright, great. So once again, it’s Craig Jacobson, with open spaces marketing. So go to open spaces marketing. com, there’s a survey that you can take there. Take that survey will answer some of the questions that Craig needs to know so that he can make a bigger difference in your life and help you get a better understanding on what direction you should go. And if he’s not a fit for you, I he definitely knows someone that can work with you and help you get more focused in your business to where you can help more people and make the world a better place. So I want to thank you for showing up, Craig. Thank you Shoan. Okay, we’ll talk to you soon.
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