How Matt Jones Has Used A Facebook Group To Build His Business
In the podcast:
02:19 – How Matt Started
06:28 – Birth of Matt’s Tradie Web Guys
08:19 – Know Your Niche and Stick With It
09:46 – Building Up Lead Generation for His Business
13:06 – Site Shed Podcast and How it Generates Leads
16:55 – Using Facebook Group and Getting Qualified Leads
19:09 – Results of Using Facebook Group
20:43 – Know Your Target Audience and Moderate Your Group
25:21 – Risks Of Creating A Community on a Platform You Don’t Own
27:28 – Don’t Go Hardsell
28:14 – Lead Time for Conversion
30:50 – Don’t Gauge What’s Popular Based on Listen and Downloads
33:16 – Quality Leads Over Quantity of Leads
Matt Jones discusses how he has used a free Facebook group to build a community of engaged and hyper targeted leads for his business. He discusses the common mistakes people make with Facebook groups and also the success he has had with it. Don’t miss this episode.
Ilana: Welcome to today’s episode of Talking Web Marketing. We’re up to episode number 28, and today I am introducing a guest called Matt Jones, who was a plumber. And he decided that he would not pursue the traditional path of plumbers and took a bit of a left turn, as he noticed that there are a lot of other agencies are that weren’t taking care of trade based businesses in any way. So that led him to start his own digital agency called Tradie Web Guys, which provide digital solutions for trade people. And he also has a podcast called The Site Shed.
So I invited him on today’s show to talk about really how he built the agency and the podcast. And one of the key aspects that he has done to do this is a free Facebook group. So it’s a little bit contentious, because some people don’t agree with Facebook groups, and some people love them. But I invited Matt on to talk about his experience with it. And I guess the common pitfalls that people fall into with Facebook groups and the way he’s been sort of really successful in doing so. So welcome to today’s show. Matt Jones.
Matt: Thank you for having me.
Ilana: It’s lovely to have you on. I always like to talk to people who have a very interesting background and work in different kind of niches. So can you kind of start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background and the industry working now?
How Matt Started
Matt: Sure. My background is actually plumbing. I used to be a plumber or I still a plumber, I suppose. I still have the ticket, I use it very well. You probably wouldn’t want me fixing your plumbing these days. It’s been a long time stepping out of the game. But yeah, that’s where it started.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia. And like a lot of kids, I suppose going through the academic system, I realized that I probably wasn’t what you would consider the academic type of student therefore coming up to, you know, that life changing decision where you’re like, Okay, what am I going to do for the rest of my life when you’re 16, which is ridiculous. I thought, I want to be a trader. So I was working with a mechanic, it was as like a part time job after school and stuff when I was when I was younger. And one of the mechanics there, his brother was a plumber. I said this when I was in kindergarten, when you write down what you want to be when you grow up. Apparently, I wrote down plumber. So yeah, I don’t know what the deal is with that. One of my good friends. His dad was a plumber. So maybe I thought it was cool. But anyway, it so happens, I reach this mechanic and he said, He was pretty keen on doing an apprenticeship. You reckon you’d like to have a chat with him? Or, you know, whatever. And he said, Yeah, absolutely send them down. And basically, within a week, I had a job and I came home and said, Mom, I said, I got an apprenticeship.
He was like Jesus that didn’t take long. So I started my apprenticeship, I loved it through honestly, I really enjoyed the apprenticeship. I enjoyed the trade and enjoyed the customer interaction always that kind of stuff. And then I did what most young Australians do, they’ve, I finished my type course. And I packed my bags and took off around the world for three years, while I was away, I was doing a number of things in various countries, plumbing was one of them in the United Kingdom, and Canada and America.
Matt: And I just realized that I as much as I liked it, I’ve kind of felt like it was a little bit I was kind of stuck. I was working for some massive companies in the United Kingdom. And you were literally just a number and it was kind of disheartening. I really enjoyed the work but I thought, you know, the structure is a bit wrong. So I started taking an interest in business while I was away and reading lots of, business books. And when I came back to Australia, I thought, I’m just going to start my own business. So the classic example here of and this is very common in the trades, you go and do your apprenticeship you serve your time and you know you may be very good at the trade but you have no idea to run a business. So when I came back to set up my business and I didn’t have anything in order I didn’t have any idea how to you know, put tax aside and all that kind of stuff I ended up in all this debt and all this you know stuff that you just stupid frowned upon you look back on it you think you really needed a mentor which is exactly what I needed. It teach me how to run a business it wasn’t the case sort of went through the school of hard knocks there and and I ended up anyway, after a while I got screwed over by a builder as many people have been, and I lost a lot of money in that. Then I got offered this position, which was a sales and marketing role. And I was like, Oh, this is great. And that was actually through at that time, and the guy I that was mentoring me. And he said, I have this client. Would you be interested in it? I was like, Yes, actually, that’d be great.
So it was a sales and marketing job, I jumped at it, because I thought, Oh, this is a good chance for me here to learn how business works, to learn this whole, you know, organizational structure, and, you know, all this kind of stuff. What I didn’t know that point, of course, was that by taking that job, I would not only be learning, you know, what works, I would be learning more of what doesn’t work important.
Ilana: Equally I’d say.
Matt: And so yeah, I took that position. And it was a really good experience, but then I sort of got fed up with archaic processes and systems. And I’ve always been quite technology minded. And, you know, when you’re working in organizations, with dinosaurs, it kind of becomes a bit tedious. So anyway, at the end of the day, I always will, basically working with plumbers. And we had a lot of clients who are selling high ticket products to them around Asia Pacific and they come back and say, ‘Hey, listen, if you don’t start selling some of the stuff you’ve sold us, we’re going to be sleeping in the trailer that we just bought off you’. So I said, ‘Well, you know, you got to get on your website’. And they said, ‘Well, we don’t have a website’. And I was like, ‘Well, you better get one well, how do I do that?’ And I was like, I’ll just look after for you. So I ended up building a couple of these guys websites, and they spoke to friends and friends. And then it just started growing. So as a result, I ended up leaving that job. And I do worry about that all wrong as well. I might add, I sort of basically through the talent and said, whoo, I’m out of here. So I hate it at that stage. So I pretty much did everything wrong. And the upside in the business, and that was, what, seven or eight years ago.
Birth of Matt’s Tradie Web Guys
Ilana: So that business is what’s become the Tradie Web Guys. Yeah?
Matt: Yeah, that’s right. So we started it was Tradie Web Guys and we start actually, it actually started as plumbing work guide, we just did websites for plumbers, Plumbing Companies, but then after a while, very early in the piece that that morph to Tradie Web Guys.
Ilana: So for those listeners who don’t know, what is essentially a web agency for trade people.
Matt: Yeah, more or less, we just do we do digital solution. So we have websites, and we do some marketing strategies and mainly in the space of a lot of content related stuff. So we do a lot of things that tie back to the website as the platform. So landing page creation, content creation, on page SEO, all that kind of stuff. And then recently, we sort of, we’ve been moving a little bit more towards the paid marketing side of things. But yeah, that’s effectively all we do. We just work with trade businesses, and we just help them establish foundation that will facilitate scale. So you just try to avoid that scenario for our clients where, you know, and we get it all the time, because people come to us almost weekly with to inquire about websites that I’ve had to build it months ago, and they want to, you know, do something to it, and we have to rebuild the whole thing in order to enable it. So we just trying to avoid that for them.
Know Your Niche and Stick With It
Ilana: And I like the fact that you’ve chosen you know, your vertical because I think there’s a huge amount of power in that it makes it very easy for people to refer you work because you guys are experts in the trades and but I would imagine it be quite tempting to then maybe go to hair dresses or something all sort of expand out a little bit. Have you kind of had that way you’ve been tempted to kind of go into a different vertical?
Matt: Yeah, I mean, hair dressers a trade by the way.
Ilana: I know. But like, that’s why I said it, where it’s like, it is a trade, but it doesn’t fit in your plumber, electrician, you know, like, there’s always that gray area, which is is like this carrot that’s dangled in front of you to test how much you get a stick meeting. You know.
Matt: I mean, look at the end of the day. I’ve niched myself, as you know, the expert in towards trades. And that is where we focus all of our marketing all of our attention. We don’t do any marketing outside of that. Now, of course, as a result, through friends and colleagues and things like that, we will get people inquiring, ‘Hey, can you help with do it, Hey, can you help us to a website, blah, blah’ things like that. So we have done websites or companies that are not trade specific, at the end of the day, you know, small business is pretty similar across the board. And so the principles and the applications that would apply to a lot of those businesses correlate across vertical. So we have done other businesses that are not trades, but we just don’t focus any of our marketing attention on that.
Building Up Lead Generation for His Business
Ilana: Okay, that’s interesting. So since you mentioned marketing, let’s kind of talk into how you’ve managed to market your agency because you have built a really, really big agency. So credit to that. That’s an amazing achievement.
Matt: Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s really big.
Ilana: Don’t put yourself down, it’s easy to do, you know, like having a built an agency myself, one of the best source of getting clients is referrals. But it’s very hard to scale referrals. So beyond referrals, how have you managed to really build up that lead generation side for your business?
Matt: It’s funny, you know, our main source of specially qualified customers are qualified leads come from referrals. So we’ve got and to be honest with you, very few of them come from customers, traders are quite hard for some reason to get them do refer friends and colleagues and whatnot. But it does happen, but not a lot. So we’ve built a really strong referral network, and we’ve got a lot of strategic partners, a lot of strategic alliances, we do a lot of referral work between each other’s organizations, we’ve done that from the beginning. I mean, that was the best low budget way for us to get work. So that worked really well. And then we found as well, you know, when we’re talking about, say, call out, Rachel, you know, trying to do your own marketing and getting leads in. Yeah, it would work. But when you’re talking from a conversion perspective, like, obviously, as you just said, the amount of conversions we were getting, when it was coming through a referred lead was far greater than the, you know, the conversions were getting off, say, paid ads, for example.
So it kind of got me thinking as well, when I was in. So earlier in the pace, we in the tradie web guys, we’re going down that path of, we’re investing quite a lot in educating. Because I believe there, I still believe now, you know, if you can empower people or your industry with knowledge, and I suppose a basic understanding of the fundamentals of various as far as things that you might provide. So, for example, we invest quite heavily in educating our clients on how they can update their own website sites, and how they can create content, now, they can, you know, create on page SEO friendly content, all this kind of stuff. And we don’t do that, because we think that they’re not busy, we do it because we want them to be in a position where if they have the resource, they can facilitate it themselves, and they don’t have to feel like they’re completely dependent on us. Second part is, you know, you’re equipping them with the knowledge will have a basic understanding of, if they do want to outsource it, they know what to ask, and they know what to be looking for in that scenario. So it’s like a double edged sword. Really, a lot of people think we’re nuts, because we’re giving so much away. But at the end of the day, it’s not for us so much about, you know, I mean, information is everywhere today, you kno we’re in the information age, people can get information to things. So we figure we can provide that information, it makes us It makes us look good. And it puts them in a position where, they can learn a new skill, if they want, that will typically call light too many businesses, and then if they want help with it, we can help them with it.
The Site Shed Podcast and How it Generates Leads
Matt: So it’s basically giving them the option as opposed to say, Well, this is, you know, this is it, do it or don’t like we sort of like, give me a bit more of an option in that decision making process. So where was I going with that? Oh, yeah, so we started educating, and, you know, like, always speaking it, you know, Department of Education down in Canberra, at the Round Table of ants, and always kind of stuff and then take New South Wales. And this is really good , we can look at feedback from that. But it was kind of micro like, you could only reach the people that were in the room or that were at the event. And so I was thinking, how can you make this more of a macro model where you can really get this information, but people are actually telling us there, and they get benefiting from how can we get this out to the masses. So February of 2016, I launched the site shed and the site shed from the get go is basically a business platform where trade business owners can come and get resources, information, tools, join a network, all that kind of stuff that’s relevant to the industry. So that started as, and still is today, a business podcast for traders. And you can get all of that across anywhere you listen to podcast, really, it’s the leading business podcast for tried businesses in Australia. And it’s growing very rapidly in the US, which is kind of cool. Yeah. And so basically, we just talk about business related things they are, I get lots of amazing guests on the show, because no one wants to listen to me. But they certainly want to listen to the people that we get on there. Because there’s some extremely smart business owners from around the world and industry experts that specialize in different areas that can that that relate to the trades. And so now we’re 160 odd episodes, you know, we have recorded 172 or something. So we backlogged, pretty fair bit as well. So yeah, it’s going it’s going really well.
Ilana: So the goal of the podcast is, obviously to feed your agency with leads, is that right?
Matt: It’s sort of twofold. It’s got to the point now, where the podcasts is sort of become its own business. And I don’t mean that necessarily from a monetary perspective at this point. However, there is some things I can’t talk about, because I’m under NDA. And yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s coming up with that, which is going to be really good. So the the Initially, it was a way that we could educate the masses, and if they needed digital solutions, we could fly that flag for them. And it still does work as that as well, I might add. So we get a lot of leads that come through the podcast, I run promotions at the beginning of the podcast on things that we’re doing. So that might be for example, websites, it could be events we’ve got coming up, we run these crazy events all over the world where we take people skiing, and we run business workshops, and surf shops, and all this kind of stuff. So we’ve been doing that for for quite a while. Yeah, which is fun. And so anything like that we promote through the podcast, and then that, you know, typically drives us a lot of traffic, leads and eventually customers.
Ilana: That’s awesome. So you put that in the intro with some kind of, promo. And obviously, the promotion ends by a certain date
Matt: For advancement, you’ve got to get things up. So you know, you you can only take so many on an event and to be honest with you, the only one to take so many years it gets pretty hard to manage. You get too many people in there. So it’s very often a case of the less is often more. It’s the small events and they’re really sort of targeted towards on a certain topic, which we teach. And we do it in a way and and I was asked to ski during the day and we do business workshop in the afternoon or surf during the day and business workshops in the afternoon. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.
Using Facebook Group and Getting Qualified Leads
Ilana: Yeah, so before we hit record, you mentioned that you also have a free Facebook community, how are you managing to get people into that community? Some kind of like funnel and I guess second follow-up to the question is, what is the point of the Facebook community?
Matt: So the reality is and this is kind of by design as well, I might add, when I was sort of thinking, how can we reach more qualified customers? I think there’s a big, there’s a big disconnect between people getting so caught up in traffic, that they neglect qualified traffic as a massive variable. And when I was sort of brainstorming, you know, before we launched the site shed, and all that kind of stuff. I was thinking, well, how can we like, who are our best type of customers typically who understand, willing to pay the money, and want to learn a lot. Who are these people? And so it was sort of, at the time when podcasting was sort of kicking off and getting, you know, starting to become a bit more popular and I thought will typically people listen to podcasts are people that have a little bit of a little bit tech savvy, so they kind of, you know, not like tech wizards, but they, you know, they’ve, they’ve figured out how to get it on their phone, or, you know, connected their car or whatever it is, they can typically they’re willing to invest in education like, albeit that at that point, you know, it’s, it’s a time investment, but, you know, time is a commodity. So that’s a good, that’s a good qualify for us. So that’s why we launched I suppose the podcast to a degree because, I mean, if in reality, if I was to look at statistics about, you know, the amount of traders around the world that listen to podcast, you’ll probably find that it far more of them will watch a YouTube video, the type of person that type of business that we wanted to attract wasn’t that type of the top and I wonder track with somebody, it was far more invested education bit more in technology that quarterly.
Ilana: That’s quite intentional.
Matt: Yeah, it was by design. So there will be talking about off the bat. So we had, you know, some products and some calls and things like that we were selling. And we were driving people into a, like a webinar through Facebook ads.
Results of Using Facebook Group
Ilana: How is that performing?
Matt: Yeah, I mean, look, it was, well, statistically, it was performing far better than all of that piece. We sort of set this up with, you know, within a group and they were comparing stats and that kind of thing, and as we’re counting it, but I think that was largely due to the that like the targeting aspect on Facebook. Some of these some guys were spending, you know, $200 to get someone to watch a webinar, we were spending 100 bucks, which it was still a lot of money. And it doesn’t mean of course that you’ve got a sale. So, you know, from there, we would stick them into a funnel, and we educate, nurture and, you know, we basically put them through like, the start that education process because it was, it was a relatively high to get costs to, like, these guys are paying, you know, five grand plus for these for these costs. So, it wasn’t like a small thing. It’s not like a 99 but course and, you know, if you go so, it was going okay, but I just, I was like, the, I don’t know, I just felt like we were getting so many people that wouldn’t click on watch half a half a webinar, we tried all different formats, and we tried different time, like links for the webinars always kind of staff and different content, and it just felt like it wasn’t it kind of felt way too salesy for me. And I wasn’t really that comfortable with it. And I think being being a trader myself I kind of always me off you know, always like I wouldn’t watch these Why would anyone else watch this I have that kind of attitude.
Know Your Target Audience and Moderate Your Group
Ilana: Like the fact that you are your target audience to some degree you had that extra you know insight to go this is just not my industry you know, so I can imagine like the noise in the market from the IM internet marketing guru saying, you got to be nice you got to be that but then it’s like mismatch in your industry.
Matt: It’s exactly right. And it sort of leads into what I’m what we absorb now in our community, right. So obviously, you and I met with, you know, and networking community in, in Sydney. And, you know, the father runs that preaches a lot about about well, I know Well, yeah, yes, definitely. But um, you know, we were talking about communities, you know, having having membership sites, and all this kind of stuff. And I went down, it was funny, because I was at the point where we’d set up, we’d set up the program or this course. And it was basically on a membership site effectively, and we’re back kick off the forum side of things. And I sat back and I look at it, and I thought, this is retarded, like, I was in this group. And I would never, ever, ever jump into that forum, I just would never log in. And I just couldn’t feel like me understand how people have the time to sit in this membership site all day, and just post comments. And I just couldn’t for walk me understand how it works. And I thought, there’s something in this, like, I am not the right audience for this group. And I am my customer at the end of the day, and I know my customers I’m going to be, it’s far easier for them to commit to something like a Facebook community than it is to a membership site, because I just won’t be there. I just know they won’t be there.
Ilana: And that has engagement issues.
Matt: Exactly. Right. So, you know, we build a build a bit of a stretch did year round. And, you know, we did a bit of research on it as well. And I thought, what the hell the end of the day, like, you know, either I invest heavily in building my own membership site, which I’m not convinced by any measure is going to work, because there’s been a couple of people in the industry who would try to do similar things, and they all just fees. And then I thought, Well, why don’t I try doing this in, you know, doing it on Facebook, it’s not gonna cost me anything, well, it’ll cost me nothing, but considerably less.
And at least I know that I’ve got, you know, I can target my audience from there. And I can, you know, I can reach out to people I can get them in. And so we built a bit of a strategy around because we already had the podcast and the podcast was, you know, becoming very well known, like, both here and abroad, I thought, all let’s build a community around or in like, a private Facebook group. And let’s just make it really, really high quality members, and really, really high quality conversation. And so, you know, there’s a lot, especially in the trades, and I mean, I’m sure a lot of your listeners would not be familiar, but trust me, there’s a lot of out there, like these, these groups, and they basically just slides the hell out of each other. And it’s, you know, it’s pretty vulgar, and we didn’t want any of that. So we, you know, we put together a bit of a policy for letting people in people that come in, you know, we have to answer questions. And as I said to you yesterday, you know, we actually block more people than we lead into the group. So, because we want only want qualified people and everyone that, you know, the qualified conversations that we’re having to be, you know, that we wanted to stay and maintain a standard
Ilana: That’s your duty as a community organizer is to set a precedent and maintain that level of quality.
Matt: Well, I would agree with that. But then I’ve never seen a group that actually does it all. For me, I was like, I just, I mean, especially in the trades, like, it’s always it’s just crap. So yeah, so that was part of the deal. And we, we set it up like that. And then basically, people that come into that community, they have the option there, if they want to sign up for a bot, or if they want to, you know, go into like, a, if they want to get sent information, if they want to be sending information, they go into our newsletter, which goes out weekly. So then we can educate them more. And we can recap on things like podcasts and all that kind of stuff. We’re basically is add value. It’s almost like a curation, if you will. And so yeah, so so that community has been running for a long, long time now. And the feedback we get from it is just phenomenal, what is people I just can’t believe the value that comes out of these groups. And it’s better by design, you know, we’ve got the right expert in there, we’ve got the right people will type of business owners in there. And I mean, we, we boot a lot of people out there, like, even yesterday, there was some guy dropping, you know, C bombs and F bombs. And I just, I mean, I won’t even warn him I just removed him out of the group was just don’t have the time, the energy this is too much engagement in that group don’t have to worry about that sort of people. So yeah, I just, I just screenshot it and send it to send it to my social manager and just said, Here, this is what I’ve done. And she’s looking at numbers.
Risks Of Creating A Community on a Platform You Don’t Own
Ilana: Have you kind of, I mean, you know, the, the risk, obviously, with the Facebook group, it’s, you know, that it’s on a platform you don’t own and control and, you know, Zuckerberg can, you know, strike of whatever, have you kind of added some level of insurance with that, like, have you got people’s email addresses? So that if you Yeah,
Matt: Okay. I mean, as I said, Before you know, we say, would you like to receive information on blah blah, whatever it is, and if they do, then they would stick them in the newsletter, but that’s all, it’s all good in theory, you know, like, and I get that the whole, you know, and I’ve always preached this to people, and I still preach to people today, you know, if you’re gonna, if you’re going to invest in in things and, you know, have some sort of control over it. And I especially relate that back to websites, you know, like, we see, you know, when, when clients go and post, you know, these huge, huge pieces, or, you know, effectively blogs on their Facebook page, and why guys, he’s doing this wrong, like, they should live on your website, and you should be posting a link to Facebook, sending people back to your website, that kind of thing. But are we talking about community, again, it just comes back to that analysis we do in the early stages, like, you got to be realistic about where your customers are. So, I mean, if I was targeting, you know, if I was talking targeting mortgage brokers, I probably wouldn’t have a huge success on Facebook, or maybe I would, I don’t, I don’t know. But, you know, you probably find, you’d have a better better hit, right, you know, with a LinkedIn group or something like that. So it just comes back to what you think your customers are going to be, and what’s going to get the best engagement.
I mean, I just know the quality of people that we’ve got in that group, and that I pay to be in there, but we pay for that to be in so we run, you know, Facebook ads to drive people into a free community. So, you know, when you comparing that to the webinar, the webinars that we’re running and earlier in the pace, you know, we’re paying 700 bucks per view of the, of the webinar, which was good, and then the now, you know, we’re getting people into a free community for, you know, under under 30 cents.
Don’t Go For The Hard Sell
Ilana: So, wow, the difference in cost per conversion, isn’t it?
Matt: Well, I mean, you got to think about as well, the offer there, right. So when you’re trying to sell people in a webinar, like, they know, you’re pitching something, at the end of it, when you’re selling people into a free community, they’re joining a free community. So it’s not like, it’s the hardest barrier of entry, you know, so that was kind of by design as well actually make this easy for people to get in. And then if they want information, or if they want services, and all that kind of stuff in you know, that’s available for them in there. But it’s, we found it, we find it works better to do it that way, and then go for the hard sell, and then try to nurture because typically, what happens is if you go in, if you start with that big sell your typically lose them. And whereas if you start with, you know, education, nurturing and just, you know, community, you know, I appreciate that. And without something pops up they need, then we can, you know, we can volunteer it.
Lead Time for Conversion
Ilana: Do you have any idea of those kinds of steps like that conversion from the group to some kind of sale of some degree, do you have any idea of that lead time, and if those leads to convert.
Matt: Not really, to be honest with you for something that , it’s a conversation I had with my, um, my manager I meet two weeks ago, and I said, we’re going to start putting a bit more effort into into that and the like, just analyzing and reaching out to these religious group members, it just as well it comes down a resource like it’s a when you’re running a community is really, really engaged, it does take quite a bit of time, and it does take quite a bit of vetting.
Ilana: And that was my next question actually, like how much time do you find it takes to manage this group?
Matt: I don’t spend a lot of time in there but I mean Italia, she she spent a lot of time in there. So she’s it’s basically a job she made it to the group she she qualifies the people that are in there she if I mean, it’s funny now as well. Like, initially, we sort of it was up to us to sort of come up with questions and, you know, start conversations. But now that it’s more established that we find that we don’t even have to post stuff like, people would just come in there. And they asked questions. And then next minute, there’s a thread of 150 comments that all tie back, you know, from, from business owners all across the globe that have had experiences with that area. I mean, that’s better feedback than we could ever give what you’ve got a collaborative group of people here that are willing to, you know, invest and share their experience, it’s, it’s kind of, it’s at the point where it kind of feels that cell from content perspective, which is great, because then as a result, you know, when we see a really active thread, and we see a really, you know, engaged conversation, then I can take that, and I can extract that into a podcast, and I can do an episode on and get an expert on the show. And, you know, I mean, like, it sort of gives me content leverage.
Ilana: So I can see it’s kind of like, it all feeds into each other. You know, the podcast, I’m sure feeds into the community, the community feedback to the podcast, they’re all kind of linked in some degree. So what kind of Facebook ads have you tried? Or is that probably not a question for you? Since you might not do that?
Matt: Yeah, I don’t really do a lot of it. But we when we’ve run so image ads with long copy, we’ve run image ads with short copy, we’re trying different types of images. And to be honest with you, like, I look at the ads that we’ve created, and I just think my God is so crap I just don’t like it. But then you got to as like, as I keep getting told, it’s not about you, You got to look at what’s working. So I sort of try and swallow my pride when it comes to those sort of things.
Don’t Gauge What’s Popular Based on Listen and Downloads
Ilana
To do that on a daily basis. Like I you know, I say to people all the time, I’m constantly humbled online, things that I think will work don’t think i think will will just be terrible killer, like, because I’m not the target audience, you know, so you have to leave your ego in the other room, you know.
Matt: Yeah, we’re doing some it’s funny as well, for the live it drives me crazy. But you look at um, a couple last couple of weeks, we’ve we’ve had to draw some, you know, some pretty some statistics from the podcast is in relation to, you know, what’s the most popular content always kind of stuff. And to be honest, we want to form we put we podcasts, it’s very hard to gauge what’s most popular, purely based off, listens and downloads, because I mean, I don’t know about you, but I mean, I subscribe to say, a handful of podcast not a lot, by the way, I just, you know, it’s only a few of them, I listen to. So say, for example, you know, the Tim Ferriss podcast, or whatever it is, I don’t I listen to that podcast when it comes out of, you know, every week. So whether or not it’s a, you know, a good point what I would consider an amazing podcast, or if it’s a good podcast, or if it’s not so great, I still listen to it. So I feel like if you’re trying to gauge you know, how you good your content is based off a download or listen, it’s not very accurate. So we try and, you know, we draw more of our, we draw more about stats out of kind of communication and content that’s come from within the community based around the topics within that group. And then a lot of the content for the podcast.
Now, as I just said, he’s kind of fueled by those conversations as well. So we know that it’s going to get better engagement, because it’s almost like you getting out getting to the community to buy in to the content that we are creating. So they sort of feel like they’re invested in it. And we’ll do things as well, you know, within the community, where I’ll say, Hey, guys, we’ve got this episode coming up on on finance, you know, you’ve all wanted to know about equipment finance, and vehicle finance. I’m getting the seller on the show to talk about it. What are some of the questions you want to ask? And, you know, it makes them buy into a little bit more than when you actually recording the podcast. You know, you can say, Hi, this was a question from a lot. I she wanted to know a little bit more about interest rates, and it just, he makes them feel like they invest. And they are to be fair, like those basically, it’s those comments that are really led to the creation of that podcast, which is good for everyone.
Ilana: Yeah, that’s awesome. Cool. All right. Well, I think that pretty much covers everything unless I’ve forgotten something that I should have asked you.
Quality Leads Over Quantity of Leads
Matt: Yeah, I think that pretty much wraps up. I think, at the end of the day, as we said before, it’s not really like lead generation is super important. But what’s more important is qualified lead generation. And if people can just make that paradigm shift from that whole churn and burn mentality where they’re like on a more customers anymore leads anymore, listens, any more downloads and always kind of stuff like that doesn’t necessarily reflect success. And you see all the time and you’ve listened to, you know, there’s a lot of podcasts out there that, you know, best strategies to create as many as possible and you go and listen to them and their and you think why what’s the point like, I’d rather listen to one good podcast a month from this person that they’ve, you know, put time into preparing and, you know, three a week because it’s all garbage.
Ilana: So quality over quantity any day
Matt: Yeah, but I think it correlates as well into you know, everything like the community managing or you the community you’re building that correlates into the language you use on you know, across your, your marketing or whatever it is your education and it really like I can tell you now, like I’d rather have a I’d rather have a group of 100 really qualified cane positive people then you know, 10,000 tire kickers that I just did a sledge in, you know, just take a piece and not add any value, you know, so, but if you look at that from us, the digital point of view and you say, Okay, well, you know, and that’s all your question you get, well, how many people in your group and you know, how many downloads, you get all this stuff, it doesn’t really matter. Like, it’s not about that. And I think people get too caught up in too caught up in these things. And, you know, especially when you’re targeting a specific vertical, like, that’s never really it’s never really relevant, because if you want it to mass numbers, you would not be targeting a specific vertical vertical, you just go the shotgun approach and see what sticks. But, you know, when you’re really trying to build a tight knit community, even, you know, that meshing approach and that qualification process becomes so relevant and, you know, when you compare it to what else is available in the market place, it becomes a differentiator like it makes you stand out.
Ilana: Yeah and I think that’s really, really sound advice on that thank you so much for coming on today show it sounds like you’re doing some awesome work in your space. And I love the fact that you’ve chosen a vertical so and obviously killing it in your vertical so well done. That’s awesome.
Matt: Thank you for having me.
Ilana: Yeah, thanks for coming on. And we’ll talk to you soon.
