Hey welcome to Social Media Hangout Time. I’m Janet E Johnson and I’m here with Kimmy, the salon owner as well..
Hi everybody!
As well as our guest, Mike Brooks. And I want to introduce Mike Brooks properly here because I have been listening to his podcast for I would say probably at least six months if not longer. And so I reached out to him because I love his content and I am excited to have him on the show. So welcome Mike!
Well thanks, it’s nice to be hear and I appreciate the kind words that it’s always nice to hear somebody’s listening.
Yeah, absolutely. Well let me give you a proper background, I’m going to read your bio. Obviously we know you have a podcast, because we just talked about that, but talk about what your company is and what you do. Mike Brooks’ company is Nuclear Chowder Marketing and in a minute I’m going to ask him why he named it that but there’s probably a reason behind it. What he does is he helps small businesses with their online marketing. And they build websites, mobile apps, manage search, info marketing, social media. They have a very hands-on approach and a mission, their mission is their clients’ success. He’s a blogger, which I know he does a lot of blogging and podcaster and a speaker-for-hire. He also loves helping folks succeed. And if you listen to his show, it really stands out that he definitely is very helpful to the business owner. And he was an owner of a martial arts school for over 10 years. So he knows how hard it is to run a small business. He’s been in the trenches, it sounds like. So welcome Mike and let’s start with answering the question of why did you name your company Nuclear Chowder Marketing? There’s a reason behind that.
Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons actually. Obviously when you name your company you want something that’s going to stand out and that’s always the kind of marketing I’ve always done is to try and stand out in the noisy crowd. When I first got into the martial arts school we had a big competitor near us and another franchise school near us so we were like the really little guy and needed to make noise. So I always, my style of marketing has always been how can I make some noise and differentiate myself. So the name definitely differentiates myself but when I first named it, it was actually called Offline Marketing Online, which was a search optimized name and it was one of those things that I though of because I was started taking clients on those at the martial arts school. And it just happens that one of my clients came in and said, and actually I tell the story a lot if people listen to my podcasts. It’s my favorite, one of my favorite stories to tell is a client came in one day, parent of a client – student, whose at the front desk and talking to me and he owned a business and he said, “I googled martial arts in Brookfields last night,” no I’m sorry, “I googled pizza in Brookfield”, he was looking for pizza and we came up #1 or #2. So he was like I need to hire you to do. So I started taking money from him, I had to figure out what’s my business name so I created the website Offline Marketing Online and that was my business name. It was really never meant to be a business name. So I pledged to myself that when I was going to eventually get a LLC and do it for real one day. I kind of kept putting it off, putting it off and finally came to the decision in 2012, in the beginning of 2013 to actually rename the company to Nuclear Chowder Marketing. When I knew I was going to get the LLC and do all the legal stuff, to do that I’d decide I want to get a name that’s going to stand out in the crowd and I started listing off names. You could put all sorts of different things like Hire Cause Marketing or Impact Marketing, like I started coming up with all these names that were kind of cliche names, everything was taken. Everything already had a domain name. And literally every combination of one word and the word marketing was already taken so I got frustrated. And that’s like I’m going to come up with something ridiculous. And then I though about it, I started listing words off on a page that meant something to me and words like atomic, nuclear, explosives. And then on the other side, I wanted 2 words so I can have something something marketing. And then I started listing off on another page, other things that meant like pleasing. So I wanted something powerful but pleasing and I was looking for that combination – like delicious and explosive and that’s where Nuclear Chowder. I’m from Connecticut where in the northeast clam chowder is popular up here so…
Got it, got it.
One of the reasons I used to go on vacation on Cape Cod a lot and first thing I would do is get a bowl of clam chowder. Food is very important to me so Nuclear Chowder was born. If you do a lot of networking and go to events, people are kind of in a haze. They are card collectors, they go ‘hey nice to meet, what do you do, oh you do this i do this’ so I knew that something like that would grab people’s attention and it does. It’s a pattern interrupt – they look at it and wait, what! And they’re “in the moment” at that moment. So that’s the long story.
Love it, love it! But you know it makes a lot of sense. I mean we can go back to Kimmy, why is Kimmy with her green and pink hair and she has her special thing. And she actually had a question she loves to ask the guest when we start. So go ahead…
Okay Mike, alright, I have one question and it is have you ever been interviewed by a puppet?
Oh many, many times.
Oh, I feel awesome!
Mostly been interviewed by puppets. You mean metaphorically or realistically?
Realistically do they have pink hair?
Okay, realistically no, I haven’t been interviewed by a puppet.
That’s great, that’s great. But you now, kind like what you’re talking about, it’s a noisy world out there and I do agree completely that’s exactly what our show is about – standing out in the crowded world of social media. So I love it that you had a different, and I do agree about that passing out cards is something like they’d go Nuclear what I bet! I’m sure you get that.
Oh yeah. I mean that was the main intention was to kind of get people’s attention and stand out. And it works like a charm. People look at the card, I don’t even have a card in front of me but it’s very loud – it’s orange, it’s got green, very nuclear-looking so it sticks out like a sore thumb and it has the same effect on everybody. They look at the card and they look away and then they look at it again as like oh wait, this is something different and then they kind of smile and they go what! And that moment they’re paying attention. To me that’s what marketing is all about – getting people to, you got like 2 seconds to get people to pay attention to you. And you’ve got to keep people getting attention to you with everything you say so it gets us off to a good start.
You know that’s a great lead in, giving them the wow factor. So as we talk about content creation, a lot of times people say they just don’t believe in the value of I have to blog, what kind of / why should I blog. So can talk a little bit about content creation and how important it is to a business owner?
Yeah sure. It’s you either tell your story or somebody will tell it for you. And that’s what it comes down to. Content, the myth is that content is all of a sudden important. It’s been important for hundreds of years, thousands of years maybe. Going back to the beginning when the first caveman or cave woman drew a picture on the wall that showed how not to get eaten. We all tell stories. We, as people are paying more attention when they hear a story. So if I sit here and started getting on a white, start doing mathematical equations and statistics eventually everybody’s going to get bored. But if I tell a story, there’s something about a story that people engage with and they become aware and in that moment they follow, I think we’re, as humans. I know there’s probably a clinical or psychological reason behind it but we follow along with stories where just we’ve evolved or endowed with this ability to just learn from story-telling. So we’ve been doing it forever and people have been hungry for it forever. It’s just that the channels haven’t been there. So going back to the old days of marketing, you get a brochure, you get something in the mail, somebody has to reach out to you to somehow get your information. But what’s always been the strongest way to get a new client? Always, it’s been referrals. Like if I tell you a story about my experience with a client or with a business, you’re either going to not engage with that business if it was a bad story. Or you’re going to engage with that business because you trust me so the trust is going to drip down to that person. So essentially the power of creating this content for people has again, always been there – you get a brochure, you go through it, you talk to people about it. But now it’s all at your fingertips. Again, and it stresses, if you don’t tell your story somebody else will tell your story. They’re going online, people are going online, they’re googling you, they’re searching for you, they’re asking their friends on social media and they’re going way through way deep into your content. So they just start with the search engine – they go and google you and going back to the old days of “google”. You know right, you go and google something and take the first thing and usually the first thing you’re probably going to buy from that thing. You are less likely to go to the second page of Google. Now, people know. They hear your business, they’re going to go to google your business name and they got pages and pages of content whether you put it out there or you don’t put it out there. There’s stuff there on the business, if the business exist. And they’re going to go through and they’re going to read it. So as a business my question to you is what do you want the story to be? Do you want it to be your own story or do you want somebody else to tell it for you? We do want people to tell our story, of course. There’s a place for that. We want good reviews, we want feedback from clients but we don’t want to be out of our control. We want to be able to drive that narrative and explain why somebody should buy from us. So just from that perspective alone I think content is so important for every business to create. They just leave it, they’re leaving a giant hole open for their competitor if they don’t do it.
That’s true.
I agree.
And competition is another thing. Everybody is now getting awaken up to content online. The bar is higher than it has ever been. And your competition is doing it. And if they aren’t doing it, they’re gearing up to doing it. And we see it if you google things and you see that local people aren’t doing content, what you will see is that the big guys are doing it. The big companies are starting to do it. They get it, they’re creating and doing it better, they have better tools. They have more resource, they have deeper pocket so they can do video, they can do all sort of things that we as small businesses can’t do. So you’re just opening the door for where I think Google and Facebook and all these things were such a great thing for small businesses to level the playing field. When big businesses start to get into it that playing field is not going to be as level anymore. They’re going to come in to with all their tools so you got to be there.
Do you find that even if you referred to somebody, what’s your thought on that? So let’s say a business was referred to, let’s use Kimmy’s salon. Her salon was referred by somebody that was a happy client but that person doesn’t know anything about Kimmy’s salon, don’t you think that they’re probably going to look at possibly that, Google, look at their Facebook page, look at the information online, even if they’re referred in the first place?
Yeah, I think, I would answer that with a question – what would you do, and talking to everybody, what do you do when you are referred somebody? What do you do when you’re thinking of getting somewhere?There’s no longer just one way of people are getting to, and I don’t think ever that was the case I think that’s a myth. I just think there’s so much resource available to people now that they’re getting used to. The consumer is getting used to digging deep. And they’re used to going you refer somebody to me and the first thing I do is look up their website. And me as a consumer, I’m telling you as a consumer, you say you’ve got to try out this pizza place. Well I’ll say Janet doesn’t like the kind of pizza I like so I better check out this pizza place. Or I just want to see their menu.
Sure.
It may not be even be that I’m checking them out, I just want to see their menu. So I go and google that pizza place and we’ve all been. And we’ve all done it where you’ve been recommended something and they don’t show up. Maybe there’s a Yelp, the first thing is Yelp. What’s the first thing that you think when that happens? I know I think they don’t have a website, they’re not a real business!
Exactly! Or they have a horrible website and I don’t even want to do business with them because it’s so bad. Specially like I think about hotels. I love, if you’re going to stay somewhere, to go look at the rooms ahead of time and see where you’re going to stay, see what it’s all about. And if they have a horrible website and can’t represent that properly, you don’t want to stay there.
Right. I’ll tell you…
Well…
Go ahead.
Also they could have a great website if there’s no content around it or nobody talking about the experience while they were there, I think that doesn’t look very good either.
No. You know human nature we are learners and this is probably some of that psychology of why we love stories. We want to learn. We want to grow. We want to fill our mind with things. It’s just a natural human nature thing so it’s only natural that you’re going to want to dig and learn and understand deeply about that thing. And speaking of travel I’ll tell you a story. Me and my wife just booked a trip to New York. I won this trip. We only live like 40 miles from the city but we won this thing to go into see a broadway show. I’ve actually won it last year and didn’t do anything with it because it’s just a pain in the neck to book a broadway show. I don’t know if you’ve been to broadway but it’s a pain in the neck. So we’ve been just putting it off and we finally like we got to do it this summer. We picked a day and she went and bought the tickets for the show which was like ridiculous what they want for a broadway show, but that’s another story. We had to buy an extra ticket for my daughter and the amount she spent on the ticket was I would think like four tickets would be but it was unbelievable.
Wow.
It like, so anyway. I was totally uninterested in the details of it. I knew she was handling it. But once she booked it and became a reality I wanted to learn everything about it. It was annoying to her. I’m like asking her where’s the theater? What street is it on? Where’s the hotel? Okay, it’s on the Avenue of America. What’s the cross street? I wanted to know all these details like what are we going to do here? What restaurant should we go to? You start to want to know more and now I’m looking at the show. I’m going to the show’s website, I’m learning about the characters, who the actors are, what they’ve done. I’m going into this journey online because all of the information is available and I want to learn more about it. Like that’s anytime you buy something you make a purchase. You research it, that’s one thing then you make your decision. You still want to learn more about that thing and you’re going into consuming content. And the content may lead you off to a different path. Let’s say I’m going to buy something and I’m excited to buy it from this place. But I go google that place I don’t find a good website and I start reading somebody else’s story. I bond with that other competitor and then I start going well maybe I should play it from them. It’s so easy to get go off the tracks and maybe that was even a referral. I already trust and like that person but because somebody else got into my consciousness… It’s so much easier these days. Humans will only give you like a split second of attention whereas used to maybe give a couple of minutes of their attention. It’s gotten so much faster and more furious online, if that makes sense.
Yes. Yes, it’s very fast. Yes. Exactly. So for small business, can you talk a little bit about the focus of doing the content and importance of the content. Importance of putting your content out there versus this doing the busy work of your business. Now there’s always work to do in your business, obviously. When you are a small business owner you have to balance. But the importance of the marketing piece in your business.
Right. The way I define marketing may be different than ways other people define marketing so I’ll talk about that first. I look at marketing as a mechanism for selling a product. And I think of it when I create marketing I’m always trying to think of how is this helping me sell my product. And if you look at the wikipedia, definition of marketing, it’s really all about communicating, what your service or product does in order to sell your product or service. That’s what the goal is but I think a lot of people leave that ending off and just talk about the communication. Specially marketing department – they’re not focused on selling and I think marketers as a whole should be more focused on how this is selling my product. Now that’s not to say you should always be ‘hey buy my stuff.’ The sales process is a process of networking and getting to know people – understanding their problems. It’s a multi-step process. It’s not necessarily the blasting of buy-my-stuff messages but you have to be in your marketing, I believe, always focus on how this is going to improve my bottomline. You have that paradigm when that’s on your mind all the time you’re going to operate your marketing a little bit differently. You may do things, you may take things like maybe a podcast is not the best use of my marketing time. It’s a critical thinking thing, where is this going to help sell my product? I’m not picking on podcasting by any means, it just came to my mind because we are doing a podcast.
Sure.
So that’s the kind of methodology that I follow with what I’m doing with marketing. And going back to the martial arts school it’s like activities that drag the marketing and the selling of the school are activities that I should be practicing on a regular basis and as we kept statistics on new students, that was our bar, and continuing students and sales of our proshop, upgrades – we measure those things each month and the more time I spent in my office doing whatever it was I was doing, and sometimes even that’s marketing, the more those numbers were down. The more I was outside of my office and got out and did seminars and did talks, those key things that were marketing things that moved the process of somebody buying, the more the numbers went up. There’s a co-relation there – the more activity you do, so the more you sit and play with email, the less sales you make. Yes, you have to go and you have to do your email, you have to do certain things but, to do your accounting, but in the martial arts school there’s always want to coach businesses. You always hear that they’re cleaning the school because the school smells, which is important, right, that’s important for retention. You don’t want a smelly school. But how much do you need to clean it? Should you be out putting cards on people’s counters, meeting people. So the guts of what you do everyday should be geared towards marketing. because unless you’re selling your services, unless moving your bank account forward, the profits of your business forward you’re not going to have a business for very long, makes sense? I don’t know if I answered the question.
Go ahead Kimmy.
I think that’s true when you’re getting out there what you want to do is have people actually ask you how can you help me versus us going and posting a message asking them to ask us. So by educating, companies love and people love to be educated. Once they’re educated maybe in a classroom where you have 40 people in there they’re going to start to know, like and trust you then they will come to you for the sale versus you having to send them a coupon.
Yeah.
So you’re just building that trust.
Exactly. We do business with those we know, like and trust. I know for my business, you know we do internet marketing services so we want companies to hire us to build a website or do search engine optimization or social or whatever. So the best way I’m going to get clients is by doing a talk. So talking is an important part of how I’m going to get customers. You have to attack it from how can I help. You have to provide value first and you have to be helpful first, you have to be genuine. But when you do that, so I’m trying to do those activities, they’re going to help me make the sale and doing things like this help me because I make relationships when I do this. And I get referrals from those relationships when I do things like this. It doesn’t always pans out but that’s fine. The more you do those activities the accounting of that shows the more time you do these activities, the more money you make. The more customers you get. So the more I pick up the phone and follow up with a lead, the more customers I get. The more…
Yep and then your customers start referring you.
Yes.
The first thing you frequently and they like what you’ve done and that’s really a powerful engine. If you focus on what you currently have in your database of your customers and ask them to help you with referrals then that helps grow, too.
Right. Exactly.
And they can write the content for you, too, because like you said that some of the content is those testimonials are actually your best content out there, you know getting testimonials.
Oh yeah. Well you know one of the things that people have a problem with when it comes to content is what do I write about? And talking to, if you don’t know what to write about, well talk to your customers. They’ll tell you what to write about.
Good point. Great point.
And you’re doing something beneficial that’s going to move your business forward because you’re communicating with your customers so you have a touch point, you’ve an opportunity to maybe solve a problem they are having or just to even show that you care about what’s going on. You know, hey, I just want to call and talk to you and check in what’s going on in your business and they say hey man I’m glad you called because I’m having this problem. Okay so now you’re solving a problem and in the back of your mind, you’re putting in your back pocket, that you’ve got a piece of content. Because anytime that you can, somebody asks you a question and that’s an opportunity to answer and provide content. I know tons of people teach on this. It’s not anything new but it’s amazing how many people don’t do this. Don’t talk about what you want to talk about. Talk about what is going to answer a question for somebody or solve a problem for somebody. So you know when your clients I’m having this problem guarantee there are other people out in the world, in this planet that are having the same problem.
You know that’s true. And I do have a question on content since a lot of us, we read our content on iphones or ipads. It’s not necessarily sitting in front of a computer and I notice one of the services you do is mobile apps.
Correct.
And can you talk a little bit about how does content work with a mobile app?
Sure. Here’s the thing with mobile, everything’s mobile. Everything’s moving towards mobile. And business that don’t recognize that at this point are at a disadvantage so I’m getting out there a lot these days and talking about the value of mobile and why business should be in mobile so I don’t want to place too much about that. But I hope everybody realize is just how important it is to be on mobile. Now when you’re talking about an app or delivering a content through an app, it’s just an easy way to get in front of people. So people out there consuming content and you’re trying to make it easy for them to consume content. Mobile solution, whether it’s an app or mobile website, is the easy way to put that content on-demand right in front of them. They don’t have to go looking for it. You’re giving them an easy way to find it. Just push a button and there it is.
When you talk about mobile website would that be also what you call a responsive website?
Yup, yeah. Well there’s a difference. Responsive and mobile are two different things. So with responsive website might be your website and it’s set up to be responsive on a mobile device. So it’s not necessarily a mobile website. A mobile website would be you go and create your brand new, totally different mobile website. It has a deeper experience, from a mobile point of view, it’s made for the mobile phone. It’s not mad for the web, right. Makes sense? So like I make a WordPress blog it’s made for the web but then I add that response, I have a plug in to make sure it’s responsive. Or a theme that makes sure it’s responsive. It’s going to look good on mobile but it’s not necessarily made for a mobile device. I prefer a website that, you know, I prefer my mobile website to be a mobile website adding a different experience, putting all those important things right up front that somebody wants on a mobile website.
Would you suggest that, what would you suggest for a small business that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of funds to create something, I mean they’re just going with the first one, the responsive the way to go and then maybe add-on? Is it cost-wise?
Yeah, there’s tools out there to help. There’s plug-ins and themes that make your site responsive. I think that’s the #1 most important thing, right, is to make sure your site is responsive. If you do nothing else, make sure that your site is responsive. There’s debate whether that’s going to hurt you or help you. Part of Google’s algorithm now we know is the mobile experience. They want to show, they’re going to rank you according to how your mobile experience is part of the ranking. I don’t want to make people think that oh, I’m going to run and do that because it will hurt my Google rankings. It’s not as simple as that. It’s like one thing out of hundreds of other, you know. I don’t like to hype things up like that …
Sure.
..get people freak out about their search. But we know that a lot of mobile, a lot of searches that are happening are mobile. And we can come up with statistics. I can share with you statistics about mobile searches but it’s not, I don’t want to look at it on an aggregate. Think about it for your business. If you’re a destination business like a restaurant, you darn well better have a good mobile experience. And your investment in mobile should be higher than say an insurance guys. It just depends on that industry and what users are expecting at this point.
That makes sense.
Things may shift, things may change and things change over time but you know you’re a restaurant. I mean if you look it like mobile searches on Valentine’s Day this year it was unbelievable. Like crushing it. And it’s going up and up each year. So when I’m out and I’m driving and I want a restaurant to go to on the fly or even if at home, I just go to my mobile phone search for a restaurant. And the experience has to be there. If I can’t see their menu, I can’t see their content, good on a mobile device. So should a restaurant invest in a responsive site over putting up the extra money to go create a mobile-friendly site? I think not. I think they better come up with the money to invest in mobile. If you’re a business you got to treat it like a business. You’ve got to invest in the things you have to invest in. I don’t mean go on spend ten grand to make a mobile app. But you got to take it seriously because it’s just the way it is. And there are certain things you can say no to. Back when I first started in the martial arts school, if you weren’t in the YellowPages you weren’t get any phone calls. So you have to be in there and you have to come up with the money to do it if you wanted the phone to ring. And that changed. You have to invest in the things that are going to make your phone ring. I think a lot of people get caught up and having to do all these little other things but you have to investigate it for your unique business like for a salon. I think you need a mobile, I think a mobile app is an important thing for a salon.
Yep.
Because you have certain functionality that is going to increase your bottomline. And your clientele is demanding it so if you don’t do it you put yourself at a disadvantage no matter how much it costs.
And you put yourself at an advantage also from the other perspective where many of your competition might not be doing it so..
Exactly.
..you put yourself ahead of the competition.
Exactly. By the way I had like a, if I seem like I was a little distracted it was because I about to get a spider crawling on me. I hate spider so I had to go spider hunting in the middle of explaining myself.
We’d have many events during this so believe me. There was this one day when all her hair was in front of her face so there’s…(laughter)
I don’t even know where it went but I think I got him but that can really be right now.
Well for those of you who are listening Mike’s outside so that makes sense. Makes a little difference. Well good. Wee love, there’s listeners, there’s going to be listeners and there’s going to be watchers. And for those, the people that are listening and watching, we’d like to give our audience something that they can take action on that’s fairly simple that within the next 24 hours. So can you give us some advice in the next 24 hours what they can do?
Sure. I think the best thing that every company can do is go make sure that their marketing messages are dialed in for conversion. Conversion being that an action is going to be taken. So what are the conversions along the line? This is a little more complex. But what are the conversions that you want to happen? So when somebody googles you, what do you want them to do? You want them to click on your link. What do you want to happen when they come to your website? You have a strong headline on your website that really gets them to continue reading. You want a good call-to-action. You want them to be motivated to do the next step, whatever you want that action to be, that’s the conversion. So going through just doing an analysis of your own marketing, making sure that your marketing messages are strong is one of the most important things we can do. People spend too much time going what’s the next thing I could do, what’s the thing I can do? Get back to basics, go make sure your headlines are strong, make sure you’re doing all those little things like your phone number is on the website where people can see it. Making sure, check your mobile website. Look at your experience on a mobile device and see what’s going on and just assess your website and you will see things that pop out and you’re going to go ‘wow, headline could be a little stronger.’ Or maybe ‘I should change the call to action.’ This are basic things that can really, really help. So just an analysis of how you’re marketing is doing on a fundamental basis. All these tools that we have, available to us – Facebook, Twitter, all these stuffs that’s out there. At the end of the day it’s all just marketing that matters. It’s the old school, old fashioned how’s-this-headline-going-to-make-people-read on or do what I want them to do. That’s what I would recommend.
Love it, love it – going back to the basics.
I do it myself, you know. Every now and then I go man, I’ve got to get back to basics.
I freaked out myself the other day by looking at my website and not realizing on a mobile device, which I don’t typically do. And I was like oh, like it was messed up more that I would have ever expected. So I have to go in and fix it so it’s been revamping and looking, that got to remember that mobile device piece too is so important. We’re all guilty of it, absolutely.
Right.
So Kimmy I’m going to have you finish the show.
Yep and so Mike, let me ask you this: where can people find you and your products? How would you like them to connect with you?
Well sure. I mean they can go to my website, it’s nuclearchowder.com or nuclearchowdermarketing.com. And I have my blog, podcast, pretty much all over the place but if you go to my website you can see how you can get in touch of me.
Awesome. That’s great. Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot for your time Mike, thank you.
My pleasure, thanks for having me.