0:00:00.0 ANNOUNCER: The financial views and opinions expressed by the host and guest on this program do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of 107.7 The Bronc, Rider University or Certified Wealth Management and Investment. The material discussed is not designed to provide the listeners with individual financial, legal or tax advice.
0:00:19.1 ANNOUNCER: Show me the money.
0:00:19.4 ANNOUNCER: Where’s my money man?
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0:00:22.4 ANNOUNCER: It’s time to throw your bank as 107.7 The Bronc presents Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker, a certified financial planner professional with Certified Wealth Management and Investment. Kurt and his team of financial guests will help you turn those singles into seas of green and plan your financial future accordingly. Now, here is your money managing host for the hour, Kurt Baker.
0:00:49.7 Kurt Baker: Do you know how to generate online leads on your own? Do you know how to keep your client acquisition process under control by implementing cutting edge strategies? Royce Brook Media CEO Matt Montellione specializes in B2B lead generation via multi-channel outreach. His company also offers marketing training to B2B companies interested in bringing the same systems, a predictable lead generation in-house. He will walk you through the process of generating high quality B2B leads using a step-by-step blueprint as well as a sensation of having leads flowing into your business. That sounds awesome. I don’t know about other business owners, but I know in most businesses, I know in our business, it’s nice to have constant leads flowing in from some place or other… Right, so everybody gets them differently, and I’m just curious, there’s a lot going on there, ’cause I know nowadays, when I first started off in business, you’d stuck something in the mail and you mailed it off and you hope somebody respond and you get that 1-2%, you’re thrilled somebody that picked up the phone and called you. Nowadays, it’s very different, so I’m very excited about learning by them, but I guess let’s start just a little bit with your background, how did you start in this process of starting Royce Brook Media? And why are you interested in this whole area, frankly.
0:02:15.4 Matt Montellione: Yeah, that’s a great question. It started quite a long time ago. I started the company a decade ago, believe it or not, and it was the traditional entrepreneurial story I started in my mom’s basement, my employee compensation package was my mom’s chicken farm, that was about the best I could do. And I really decided, I think around age 16 that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’ll never forget this experience. I’ve got a job for this guy for the summer, washing windows, and the first day on the job, we busted our butts, we were washing this like what I looked at like a mansion at the time, washing these windows and like I said, really working hard and at the end, I remember him looking at the wife and asking, “Hey, it’s 1100, do you wanna pay or check?” and she gave him cash, and then he peeled off four $20 bills and handed it to me for my day of work, and I just realized I’m like, This guy just made a 1000 and I made 80 bucks. I need to be that guy.
0:03:09.6 Kurt Baker: You’d rather be the 1000 than the 80s. I don’t understand it that that was just very strange to me…
0:03:11.7 Matt Montellione: Yeah. Who would have guessed. And I actually never went to work for the guy again, I was like, Okay, I figured this out, no I’m kidding, but I really was like, That was a tough job, and it made me realize early on that if you could have a team of people or a person or team of people, all putting labor in together, then you can actually make a business out of it. So that was probably when I decided I was gonna be an entrepreneur. But after that, I did the traditional path, I went to college, I went to Ramapo College up in North Jersey, had a blast there. And afterwards, I had already had in my mind, I’m like, I am not getting a real job. There is nothing you can do to make me get a real job.
0:03:44.8 Kurt Baker: Okay. Now you sound like me, I never worked for anybody else. It’s just very strange. We’re a odd breed, for sure.
0:03:51.8 Matt Montellione: It’s in your DNA, I guess.
0:03:53.0 Kurt Baker: So now you know you have to do it. Now, what brought you to this area? Because, you know, this is pretty specific, I don’t know, I mean, who grows up and says, I’m gonna go do marketing. Right. Yeah, I don’t know, that wasn’t on my list of items.
0:04:05.2 Matt Montellione: And mine either, it was really like a journey it to where I am now and after college, I was fortunate I got to travel around a little bit with a little bit of money I had. I was always doing little jobs or making websites for small businesses was how I made a couple of bucks, and then I had traveled around, I was living… I won’t bore you with the story, I was living in India for a bit, like a temple in the middle of the woods, which was why…
0:04:27.1 Kurt Baker: Oh yeah, you Gandhi?
0:04:29.4 Matt Montellione: Not quite yet, no, nowhere near that, but it was a blast. And when I came back, I had a couple hundred bucks to my name, and I was like, Okay, how do I make money? What skill set do I have? And I knew how to make websites, so I said, Alright, this is a thing that a lot of small businesses need. And I remember I was ordering pizza one day or trying to, online, it didn’t even exist really back then or it was very rare. I couldn’t find the site. Couldn’t find anything. The menu wouldn’t open, so you couldn’t even see what was on there.
0:04:53.8 Matt Montellione: So when I went to pick up my pizza, I pitched the guy, I was like, Hey, do you need a website? It’s really hard to use your website, are you interested in having me make you one and I’ll do it for cheap, I’ll do it for 500 bucks. And the guy, oddly enough said yes, or he said come back Tuesday, and then we did the pitch…
0:05:07.9 Kurt Baker: I’ll give a couple pizzas. Give a few pizza pies, you know.
0:05:11.1 Matt Montellione: Yeah, I did a lot of bartering back in the day, I was eating free pizza at other restaurants left and right. And then I said, Alright, this is a business, I’m gonna go door to door and try to sell websites for $500 a piece, and then I started expanding into social media packages and expanding from there, and then I really got passionate about the lead gen side of things, and specifically in the B2B space as weird as that is, but the reason to transform… To answer your question is, I realized pretty early on walking door-to-door was not a scalable model, there was no way for me to do…
0:05:41.8 Kurt Baker: We gotta buy a lot of tennis shoes, and if we’re gonna do that one.
0:05:44.2 Matt Montellione: Exactly, I’m gonna have knee problems pretty quickly and going out in the rain, the sleet and the snow and the hail isn’t exactly fun. I know mailman, that’s their model, but that wasn’t really my model.
0:05:53.2 Kurt Baker: They have nice trucks now though.
0:05:54.1 Matt Montellione: Yeah, exactly. You just ride around. So I said, I need to figure out a way to generate leads, like no matter what, I’m going to figure this out.
0:06:01.3 Kurt Baker: We have to find the website, right?
0:06:02.2 Matt Montellione: They gotta find the website, people think you put up a website and you’re making…
0:06:05.1 Kurt Baker: They will come? Not necessarily.
0:06:05.1 Matt Montellione: No, if you build it, they will not come. If you build and advertise it, they will come. So I figured that was the… I had to spend all my time, energy and money figuring out how to do that, and it took me about a year of investing in education programs, coaching consulting, spent every little bit of profit I had, and finally landed on something, and it took us from selling by the time we figured it out, within one year, we went from selling websites from about $1000 to about $300,000. So it completely transformed the business and I was able to get in front of much bigger companies with actual budgets, you work with these small sort of mom and pops and hey, listen, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you pitch them a marketing package, it’s coming directly out of their pocket. That’s like $200 a month or $500 a month, or $1000 a month, less than they have to spend on their own personal expenses, but at a bigger company, they have a budget, so it’s not coming out of their pocket, and we just needed to get a small chunk of that budget, and we were happy with that.
0:06:57.6 Kurt Baker: Well, that’s awesome, so that’s literally how you… I was gonna ask about the B2B, but it sounds to me like the B2B is, ’cause that’s where the larger dollars are, if you get… And if you get in the door… So I have to, I have to ask you this question because I’m sure you’re not the only one to knock on a Fortune 500 company’s door and say, Gee, I’d like to run your website and they’re gonna be like… Exactly. What were you doing? And you made the pizza website and you’re gonna do our entire site for $300,000, I’m just curious of how you went from one area, 1000-300,000, that’s a huge…
0:07:28.4 Matt Montellione: It’s a big jump. And what I did was I paid people that were way smarter than me to execute the work. So like the development of the project, so a $300,000 website is obviously way different than a standard $1000 website. Now, the minimum is probably much higher than that, so I started hiring developers and designers and people that had years and years of experience and skill set, and I knew obviously what needed to be done and the requirements of the project, and I would basically pay people. My employees and then sub-contractors to do the work.
0:07:57.4 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:07:57.8 Matt Montellione: That was kind of the key. I was like, I’ve gotta get people smarter than me, I only know a little bit. I know.
0:08:01.0 Kurt Baker: And that part’s great. I guess my question was, How did you talk to the corporation… Because corporations could be very difficult to talk to, they have a very rigid method, and they usually take you through a process…
0:08:11.3 Matt Montellione: Sure.
0:08:12.5 Kurt Baker: It’s not just… Oh, okay, you walk in their front door like, Okay, I like you. We’re gonna sign you up.
0:08:17.1 Matt Montellione: That’s a good point.
0:08:18.5 Kurt Baker: And you have committees, you have people… When you spend $300,000, it’s usually not just one signature.
0:08:21.6 Matt Montellione: That’s a great point. So it definitely, it’s not an easy process to get from there to there, but I really found a great niche in companies that are doing 5 million to… Well, now it’s bigger, but at the time, $5-50 million a year in revenue, so nowhere near Fortune 500, right? That’s peanuts to them.
0:08:36.5 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:08:37.4 Matt Montellione: But they have money to spend typically on marketing packages, and to be clear, it wasn’t like we were… That was sort of an outlier, we were really focused on selling marketing packages, the reason being the problem with the website business, and the reason we don’t do websites anymore, it’s a one and done, we literally do the project, you hand it over to their team typically, and it’s over… Or you’re doing advanced security, and we weren’t… That wasn’t our skill set where you’re doing these support packages.
0:09:01.9 Kurt Baker: Didn’t have recurring income and recurring services.
0:09:04.2 Matt Montellione: Exactly. So we wanted to sell more of the marketing side of things, where I’m like, Why are the people making the website? You start to boil it down. They’re making a website ’cause they want more business. Well, if we could help them get more business, forget about the site through other means, for example, LinkedIn and email, which is kind of our specialty, that’s what they wanna pay for, they wanna see an ROI, a return on their investment. And if we can prove that we can deliver that for them, they’re gonna be much more willing to sign on, and it’s not gonna be a big chunk up front, it might be $5000 or $10,000 a month, for six months to a year, so it’s not a huge amount of money, but you get enough of those contracts and it really adds up…
0:09:36.7 Kurt Baker: Right. Okay, alright. That explains that. Okay, so now you got it up and running, so now, what are some of the things… I think you just said it a little bit, so what are some of the basic marketing things we should be doing to get our website out there? And then I guess the next part of that would be like, What should we do to get it implemented?
0:09:52.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah, that’s a great…
0:09:54.0 Kurt Baker: It’s gotta be steps, right?
0:09:54.9 Matt Montellione: Yep, no, that’s a great question. So there’s a couple of different things for the website, again, we kind of specialize in things off the website now, but I’ll give you the whole rundown, so the website in and of itself, it needs to be found by people, it’s not going to be by default, and there’s basically two ways that you’re found organically, which is going to be typically Google or search engine or some type of content marketing, an article, a blog, all these things that we consume on a daily basis, or paid advertising, and paid advertising is Google paper click ads, Facebook, Instagram, what have you. So it’s like, how do you get eyeballs onto what you offer, but more importantly, how does what you offer solve a problem for the client just being out there and saying, I fix cars or we’ll give you a new roof, that’s not enough anymore like…
0:10:40.9 Kurt Baker: I have to address their pain points…
0:10:43.0 Matt Montellione: Correct.
0:10:43.4 Kurt Baker: So when they come, they go, Yeah, that’s exactly what’s bothering me, and you have a solution for me.
0:10:47.6 Matt Montellione: You need…
0:10:48.1 Kurt Baker: You get that off my plate. Love you.
0:10:50.2 Matt Montellione: You need an offer, you call them offers, people don’t realize everything you’re putting out there is your offer, but people see their offer more as a commodity, like I sell this, I sell a roof. How could my offer be any different. I’ll give you a great example. A couple of years ago, I had a couple of rental properties, and unfortunately, you get the call in the middle of the night that literally no landlord wants to get, which is the hot water heater has exploded.
0:11:12.3 Kurt Baker: Yeah. There’s water everywhere. [chuckle]
0:11:13.2 Matt Montellione: There’s water everywhere. I’m like, This is great, I’m so glad I got into this. So I had three different companies come out to give me quotes after I got cleaned up, and one of them was the cheapest, the next person, and they were like, Yeah, we put in the hot water here. What do you want? That’s what it is. The next person, it’s a little bit more expensive, but they had an offer… The offer was, it’s a 10-year warranty on the heat exchanger, 20 year on this other thing that I had never even heard of. We also come out and give you bi-yearly service free for the first three years, so they had packaged an offer rather than just a commodity, and the third person was more expensive than that guy, and they didn’t have any of these bells and whistles, so because it had an offer rather than just a commodity, it had higher perceived value, and I ended up going with that person. I was really happy with it.
0:11:58.6 Kurt Baker: Oh, that is really awesome. We went through our first segment pretty quick, we’re gonna take a very quick break here, we’ll be right back. You are listening to Master Your Finances.
0:12:09.7 ANNOUNCER: Yeah, you’ve got loads of money. But it’s all about how you manage it. Let’s get back to learning how to, agreeing with Kurt Baker, of Certified Wealth Management and Investment only on Master Your Finances.
0:12:24.7 Kurt Baker: Welcome back, I’m here with Matt Montellione, and we are talking about strategies for, I guess, bringing clients… If they build it, they will not come. As we said, so to speak, so the idea is now you need to really focus on bringing people to it, and I think, I guess, in the past you would kind of push stuff out and just inundate people with information, I guess. Now, the opposite is true, where it’s almost like you have to lure them in it, so you have to say, Hey, and that’s probably a bad word, but what you wanna do is put out things that people are actually looking for.
0:12:56.2 Kurt Baker: And then I refer that to… In my business, I call their pain points, like what’s really bothering people? What keeps them up at night? What concerns do they have? And now I wanna make sure people understand that that is exactly the type of thing I do is address those concerns so that your pain point goes away and then things are much better. Every business is different. So how do you go through the process of deciding, okay, one. You have to know your client, basically… How do you figure out their pain point? And then now how do you address it so you actually get people to come in to the website or wherever, and whether it’s email or LinkedIn or whatever in that process? Can you walk us through that a little bit?
0:13:30.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah. Sure, happy to. So I’m mostly talking about B2B companies or businesses that sell to other businesses, but this applies just in the example I just gave to consumers as well, like creating this offer concept. And it’s really interesting, but there’s a guy named Alex Hormozi who came up with this thing called the value equation, and I’m sure somebody else came up with it before that, but it’s really, really interesting. It’s worth Googling, and really what you’re looking for is to increase the dream outcome, what the dream outcome looks like for the client, and be able to verbalize that and have them understand it, and increase their perceived likelihood of achievement.
0:14:03.7 Matt Montellione: So meaning like if you believe you’re gonna buy a new roof… I’ll use a consumer example… The dream outcome is, I have a beautiful new roof that never leaks and lasts me 50 years, whatever that might be, and the perceived likelihood of achievement is like, “Yeah, we’ve done this a million times, and it’s gonna be done on Thursday. It’s done.” So the likelihood of achievement is very, very high versus if you’re selling someone how to do your own roof, like a course on that, the likelihood of achievement would be very low because I don’t believe I can actually obtain that, right?
0:14:29.4 Kurt Baker: Yeah, no thank you. [laughter]
0:14:30.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah, and that’s why you see why the value of things costs so different. I’ll give you another example. How about working out, like a diet plan, a personal trainer versus liposuction. One costs $100 a month or a gym plan, one costs $50,000. And it follows through to this value equation, which is the dream outcome’s the same, “I’m gonna be fit, I’m gonna be skinny, I’m gonna look good,” but the perceived likelihood of achievement is, “I have to eat right, I have to do all this, I’m never gonna stick to the diet,” versus like, “Yeah, they’re gonna put me under the knife, I’m gonna wake up 50 pounds lighter.”
0:14:58.4 Matt Montellione: And it comes over the things you wanna also… So that’s the thing you wanna increase, and here’s the example for decreasing: Time delay and effort and sacrifice. So this is still the perfect example. The time delay on the liposuction is literally one day. I mean, you’re gonna recover and whatnot, and the effort and sacrifice is “I’m just not gonna feel good” versus the time delay if I wanna work out and eat right, it’s going to be months, if not years till I actually look good, and the effort and sacrifice is “I feel… ” whether this is true or not… “I’m never gonna eat something I like. I’m gonna hate it. I’m never gonna be able to eat out again. I can’t drink with my friends.” So you start to see why you can sell something for so much more when it follows these principles of the value equation because it’s more valuable to the prospect, if that makes sense.
0:15:40.9 Kurt Baker: That makes perfect sense to me. So that’s a B2C consumer. So what kind of things do you see come up in B2B? I guess if I’m a manufacturer, I need parts. So I don’t do a lot of B2B, so I don’t know. I’m just curious about how does that… ’cause you’re solving somebody’s concern. I guess I purchase products, so I know that side of it, right? When somebody flags me, I’ll go, “Yeah, you’re solving… You’re getting this off my plate, so I don’t have to deal with this anymore. Now I can focus on my clients instead of focusing on this administrative end.” That’s the big thing we deal with, like get as much of the admin stuff, you need it done right, but you don’t wanna spend a lot of time on it, so you’re willing to pay to have that done quicker and easier.
0:16:18.7 Matt Montellione: Yup. Exactly. It’s usually some type of speed or something you can’t do yourself, so in that example, it’s like, okay, I have a part I need to manufacture. How do I do it? The dream outcome is the part comes out every time perfectly. I never have to think about it. There’s not any discrepancies or deficiencies in the parts, and I’m gonna work with a company that has a really good track record that I know can actually produce it, that increases my likelihood that’s gonna actually happen, and I need it to happen in under a month. So you start to see where all these things come into play, where someone in the B2B space can position their offer and add other pieces of that perceived value to the client that might not really cost them anything but actually have a lot of perceived value to the client.
0:16:57.0 Matt Montellione: Like, someone was talking… We work with a lot of logistics companies, companies that help transport freight and do different types of transportation for goods, and one of the biggest challenges is like visibility, like, “I don’t know where my freight is, if the driver’s actually coming.” Someone’s like, “Oh, I can have a visibility tool that keeps them up-to-date.”
0:17:13.2 Kurt Baker: Like little RF chips.
0:17:14.0 Matt Montellione: Yeah, in real-time, where it is on the ship, when does it get here, when it gets loaded on the truck. They get real-time notifications. So that’s a ton of value to the client, ’cause their dream outcome is, “I actually know where my stuff is and when it’s gonna get there, and I don’t have to have any effort and sacrifice ’cause it comes to my phone in real-time updates.” So that’s gonna be infinitely more valuable, and someone’s like, “Yeah, don’t worry, we got you, we got you covered, we’ll let you know when it gets here,” and you have no idea if it’s actually coming or not, or if the driver is actually showing up.
0:17:41.1 Kurt Baker: Oh wow.
0:17:41.2 Matt Montellione: You can see how much more value something like that would have to somebody and why they’d pay more for something like that.
0:17:44.9 Kurt Baker: Right, so once we get this value proposition set up… Well, I guess we’ll use your logistics guy… So now how do you formulate the actual process to make people be aware of the value proposition that you have, so what your unique issue… What you’re doing is different than everything?
0:18:02.2 Matt Montellione: Yeah, yeah, great question. So you’re gonna typically use something like a funnel, and the funnel can be a million different things. A funnel is a fancy way to say, how do you convert somebody that doesn’t know about your product or service into a customer, and there’s multiple stages to that. And you can use your website, you can use paid ads, you can use landing pages, but what we specialize in is B2B hyper-personalized outreach. So rather than getting the customers to come to us and hoping the right ones show up, we wanna go to them. So we wanna actually do some research, identify who are the people at which companies that we wanna do business with, and then formulate a strategy to put our value prop in front of them, to actually be like, “Hey, here’s what it is, here’s what we have, here’s the challenges that you’re probably experiencing, and here’s how we can solve them.”
0:18:47.6 Matt Montellione: And we mostly focus on LinkedIn ’cause LinkedIn is like the world’s most up-to-date Rolodex so like you get a new job…
0:18:52.1 Kurt Baker: Yeah, it’s huge.
0:18:53.7 Matt Montellione: You update it instantly, so LinkedIn is a really good tool for connecting with people and adding value there, and then honestly, cold emailing, crazy as it sounds.
0:19:03.2 Kurt Baker: Yeah, email for at least our bit, it works fantastic.
0:19:04.5 Kurt Baker: As long…
0:19:04.5 Matt Montellione: It’s amazing.
0:19:04.5 Kurt Baker: As long as the content is useful, right? You don’t wanna spam people. It’s gotta be useful and valuable to the people that you’re sending it to, and I guess that’s where you get into the messaging, right?
0:19:14.1 Matt Montellione: Exactly.
0:19:15.2 Kurt Baker: You wanna explain very concisely what’s going on.
0:19:17.0 Matt Montellione: And great copy. Like good copy, like the reader can understand but great copy, the reader feels understood, if that makes sense. So really good copy, you know when you read an ad or something, and you’re like, “I understand this. This is me. They’re speaking directly to me,” that’s great copy and that’s a great ad, and that’s what gets people to click. And it’s all numbers at the end of the day, which is kind of boring. I won’t go through them here, but it’s like what percentage of people see my ad that actually like it? You can test and measure all that stuff, so you need a really good game plan, and I really believe companies need some type of digital strategy. The old days of… Even what I did 10 years ago, walking around door to door, not that it can’t work… I have kids show up in my neighborhood trying to pitch me pest control or whatever. I understand that. You’ve got a captive audience, but most things aren’t gonna work that way. The concept is leverage. I can spend X amount of dollars on an ad. The amount you’d pay that kid to walk around the neighborhood all day, you could spend that on Facebook or Instagram and reach a thousand times as many people.
0:20:13.8 Kurt Baker: Right, it’s more targeted. I guess that’s the point is you’re… I like where you walk through, where you do the research for the people. So what kind of research goes into that? So you wanna identify, I guess who the decision makers might be at the company, and once you identify the decision makers, now you have to formulate how are you gonna speak to those people in a way that says, “Yeah, that’s exactly what we need.”
0:20:35.4 Matt Montellione: Exactly right.
0:20:36.3 Kurt Baker: So how do you walk through that part of it?
0:20:39.7 Matt Montellione: Yeah, so we help clients, first of all, like what’s the low hanging fruit and who can they help the most? So if you’re a logistics company, for another example, like we were talking about, “Are you really good?” Like, “Oh, we can help anybody.” But it’s like, “Yeah, but your best clients are probably a certain niche.” Maybe they’re apparel companies. Maybe you’re really good at vitamin companies. Like maybe you have something that other people don’t have, or you have a lot of case studies to show why you’re great in a particular niche. So that’s the first thing, is pick a couple of niches that you’re really good at. They say the riches are in the niches, and I truly believe that’s true.
0:21:07.3 Kurt Baker: Oh, very much so.
0:21:07.9 Matt Montellione: And then you start to be able to identify competing companies or similar companies, and then LinkedIn will literally tell you. You just log on and you’re like, “Oh, I need to speak with the Director of Purchasing.” “It’s Jane Smith. Here she is.”
0:21:20.4 Kurt Baker: Now, they must get… And as you say, the Director of Purchasing, if I’m the Director of Purchasing in a large company, I probably get more than one in-mail, right?
0:21:28.7 Matt Montellione: Definitely.
0:21:30.2 Kurt Baker: During my year. So how do I stand out from all the other ones that they are probably getting that you know they’re getting, and they’re like frustrated ’cause they’re probably click, click, click, “Let’s get rid of all these things, they’re plugging up my mail box.” [laughter]
0:21:40.6 Matt Montellione: It is a numbers game at the end of the day, and a timing game. So you’re looking for a 2% sort of book-to-movie rate. You’re not gonna get much beyond that, but the way you do it is hyper-personalization. So rather than just spam out a bunch of messages, taking some time… Especially if these are high value accounts. If the account’s worth $500 to you, this strategy doesn’t work, but a big company like we’re talking about, a B2B engagement, that client’s gonna be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, so taking the time out of your day to research this person, and then I call it building a bridge. So how do you build a bridge to this person? It’s usually a compliment, talking about something they posted, actually a valuable insight, like reading something they posted or watching a video they posted and putting a valuable insight, a takeaway that you got from it. That’s a really good way to build a bridge between you and them, so they see that you spent the time, that this wasn’t automated, that you went out of your way.
0:22:32.1 Kurt Baker: So this is a little bit of good old-fashioned networking but you’re just doing it electronically.
0:22:36.1 Matt Montellione: Exactly right.
0:22:36.6 Kurt Baker: Where you get to know the person a little bit before you “sell them” or you provide the proposition to them. And I think that’s key to any relationship. You really… Who just walks… We talk about this at the training all the time. People walk in, they try to sell. I’m like, “I don’t know who you are.” And so first you have to get at least some type of relationship, and then you can start discussing maybe what you do and how you can help somebody.
0:22:58.2 Matt Montellione: You hit the nail on the head. And then building rapport is big, and that’s one way you build rapport. And the second way is basically video. You can send little video clips to these people introducing yourself, again commenting on something specific. Like LinkedIn literally has a button inside of there that when you’re connected, you can send a little video message from your phone, and that goes such a long way. Like, who’s gonna do something like that? It’s a game changer.
0:23:19.9 Kurt Baker: No, that’s definitely awesome. We’re gonna take another quick break. You’re listening to Master Your Finances. We’ll be right back.
0:23:24.3 ANNOUNCER: “We’re not just doing this for money. We’re doing it for a shit load of money.”
0:23:27.9 ANNOUNCER: If you want to learn how to make and manage that kind of money, turn the volume up as we get back to Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker of Certified Wealth Management and Investment.
0:23:41.1 Kurt Baker: Welcome back. I’m here with Matt Montellione, and we’re talking about… I guess we’re talking about specifically LinkedIn at the moment and the use of video, which is actually something that very recently has been the conversations I’m having with some of my peers in a mastermind group, and we’ve been talking about this and how really should be using it more. Like, as an example right now is that the market is fluctuating and things like that, if you can’t actually reach somebody for whatever reason, it would be nice in addition to emails and phone calls, maybe to send a little quick video and kinda tell them something. ‘Cause some people are very busy and they don’t have time to respond, so it’d be kind of nice to personalize and make it a little more one-on-one, as much as you can without being able to reach the other person. But my question to you would be, when I’m going on LinkedIn and I’m gonna approach somebody with a video, at least me personally, I’m okay with sending messages ’cause I can think about it and write it, but when you’re doing a video, how do you set up the messaging, I guess, that’s appropriate, not too much, not too little? Like, timing, what do you say, how you say it? How’s that?
0:24:38.4 Matt Montellione: Yeah, that’s a great way to sort of tee it up and the who, what, why script is something that we believe in and it works pretty well. Like, who you are, what are you about, and why you’re contacting them or why you can help them is more important. So it’s quick, it’s to the point, and if you can do a personalized video, which is great, you can mention something again, like we talked about building a bridge, “I just listened to your podcast. Here’s something that I found extremely valuable. I appreciate you putting that out there, and I wanted to reach out to you because… ” And then you can go in to explain how you feel you can help them, the challenges they might be facing, and how you help solve them.
0:25:12.1 Matt Montellione: So, still building the bridge upfront because that goes a long way, and you’re not just somebody blasting out a million of these. That’s gonna take you way further than anything else. People are gonna say, “Is this a manual process?” That’s obviously a very manual process. There are some systems and ways to automate some of it, but yeah, it is a manual process to a degree, but if you have an ideal client that’s worth, again, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year, how valuable is one opportunity? It’s quite valuable, so it’s worth doing the extra time, energy and effort.
0:25:42.1 Kurt Baker: Okay, so how… And then I guess my next question would be, okay, once you get this set up and you say, “Okay, I’m now gonna start using this.” Just like it with everything else, so how often would you do something like that, because as you know, the funnel, you’re saying maybe a 2% response, that means 98% didn’t respond, but there’s still high value theoretically here…
0:25:57.6 Matt Montellione: Sure.
0:25:57.7 Kurt Baker: As far as your process goes. So when do I go back to them? I guess the ones that respond, you’re obviously gonna go back right away, but the other ones that are out there, what’s the frequency… How do you set up a system to… ‘Cause you have to set up a system, right?
0:26:12.5 Matt Montellione: Yep.
0:26:12.6 Kurt Baker: To follow up through this process.
0:26:13.9 Matt Montellione: Kinda like a CRM, you’re managing the relationship of each of these individual prospects, and there’s a million CRMs out there that’ll help you manage this, and some will even sync up to LinkedIn so you can keep track of it. I like to hit people once a week for four weeks, and if they don’t respond at that point, then essentially you’re gonna recycle them a few months later, ’cause it might not be that they’re not interested, they’re just not interested right now.
0:26:34.8 Kurt Baker: They might be busy, like an accountant is not gonna talk to you in April.
0:26:37.3 Matt Montellione: That’s for sure. Right, that’s a bad time to talk to an accountant. [laughter]
0:26:39.7 Kurt Baker: It’s like, “Leave me alone.” [chuckle]
0:26:42.9 Matt Montellione: Yeah, even through October 15th, and we’re all on extensions, so yeah.
0:26:43.9 Kurt Baker: Well, that’s the one’s that just finished. No, I believe you.
0:26:45.1 Matt Montellione: Exactly.
0:26:45.2 Kurt Baker: I know a lot of accountants. Yes, absolutely, you’re right. So four weeks and then wait several months and then come back.
0:26:51.2 Matt Montellione: Correct.
0:26:52.2 Kurt Baker: Okay, so it’s kind of like doing almost like the regular advertising on TV where they’ll hit you during a season and they forget about you, and then they come back.
0:26:57.9 Matt Montellione: Then they come back.
0:26:58.0 Kurt Baker: And then they come back and… ‘Cause you still kinda remember them. So at least they’ll remember, so when you come back again, now they’re gonna have at least some memory of this person. And to me that almost like… That actually sounds pretty good, because if you’re talking to somebody and you did a little bit of a follow-up and then you took a break that means you’re not overly overbearing, so to speak, ’cause sometimes they don’t want… They don’t want a high pressure salesman on other end. They literally want somebody that’s gonna solve a problem for them, and if you come across as being pressure, trying to sell something instead of serve them, then that’s not the way you wanna come off, for sure.
0:27:29.3 Matt Montellione: You’re exactly right. And that kind of brings me to a little bit of a story and a point about switching gears to your website. Most people’s website is that pushy sales person, and the reason I say that is because 90% of the calls to action on someone’s website are “contact us today” or “book a call.” That’s like the equivalent of walking up to somebody you just met that you think’s attractive and being like, “Will you marry me?” It’s way over the top. You can’t do that. No one in their right mind would say yes.
0:27:55.0 Matt Montellione: So if you imagine your customers as fish and you’re a fishing vessel out there. Let’s pretend fishing has never been invented, you’re out on the ocean, [laughter] the open ocean, and you’re looking around and you have two schools of thought, it’s like, “There’s fish right here. What do we do?” Well, if someone says, “Why don’t we put some bait on a hook, throw it in there and see if they’ll bite it like the things they wanna eat? Let’s put that in there.” And some other guy’s like, “Absolutely not. I can see them. I’m gonna jump with my bare hands… “
0:28:16.9 Kurt Baker: Jump in and grab them. [laughter]
0:28:17.0 Matt Montellione: And try to grab them. And we know fishing exists, so we know which one’s better. But most people’s site is doing that, so instead, put something that’s valuable on your site that you can exchange for their email address. This is the tried and true tactic, but nobody does it because most people think that means, “Sign up for my newsletter.” Nobody wants another newsletter, nobody cares about a newsletter. It’s what’s in it for me. So we do one that’s like, “Download our cold email playbook.” Put it on our website, “Download our cold email playbook, which will give you the step-by-step methodology for generating ten new leads a month.” That’s something someone might trade their email for. If I put, “Sign up for my newsletter,” I’ll get zero people to put it in.
0:28:53.1 Matt Montellione: So you can always try to think of something, whether it’s a guide or a video series or something that helps them solve their problem for free, some type of digital asset that you can put on your website and exchange for free for their email address. You’ve seen it done a million times, there’s companies that are super good at it. Most B2C companies realize this because like, “Get 10% off,” you’ve gone to every big company’s site on Earth, “Your first order is 10% off. Give us your email.”
0:29:17.0 Kurt Baker: Yeah, almost every site you go to now has some kind of offer when you first come to the website.
0:29:20.2 Matt Montellione: And I’m glad you said offer, ’cause it’s an offer and that’s what their offer is, “Get 10% off.” Well, if I look at the effort and sacrifice, it’s nothing, I’m just gonna put in my email address, I’m gonna get 10% off my order. And now they’re gonna hit me with follow-up nurture emails about sales, about new products.
0:29:34.8 Kurt Baker: Right. And you kinda know that, because you’re not gonna necessarily do that if it’s not… If you’re not interested in what they’re selling, you’re not gonna sign up regardless, but if you have some interest that’s gonna kinda put you over and say, “Oh, well, that’s great, if I get 20% off on a new pair shoes that I was gonna probably buy anyway, cool. I just may not buy it today. But now they’re gonna follow up with me, so I don’t buy their stuff today, it’ll remind me. Oh, by the way, I need a new pair of shoes. That’s true. I guess I better go do that.” Right?
0:30:00.1 Matt Montellione: 100% right. And that’s one of the easiest… The most low-hanging fruit is to get people on your list, which is doing what I said something of perceived value for their email address, and then not once a month, not quarterly, twice a week, emails to your list to nurture them, so they see your name or your company name. And you’re not just pitching them, it’s like 10% maybe pitch, 90% value. So it’s all things that can help them, stories, things about their industry, news, interesting things, and you hit them with that and nurture them for long enough, you’re gonna hit them at the right place, at the right time, when they’re ready to take action, whether that’s a new roof, whether that… Whatever that is, you’re gonna be the go-to and the authority in their mind, because you’ve been sending out all this valuable content for six months.
0:30:45.4 Matt Montellione: We literally just had someone reach back out to us that’s been on our list for like two years, and then we signed a contract with them the other day. So it’s like, “What are you gonna do, have a sales rep remember to follow up with this person?” That’s almost impossible. So having a regular nurture sequence. And it’s one of the… It’s hard and it’s easy ’cause you gotta actually write this stuff and write valuable stuff.
0:31:03.3 Kurt Baker: Well, that’s the next part I was gonna ask you about. This is a lot… This is a decent amount of content. If I’m a business owner, I know the bigger companies probably have their own people or they at least can outsource. So how do you put together this kind of a campaign, because this is something that it sounds to me like one, you need to set up, you need to have enough content, enough pieces, and you can’t have one or two, you probably have to have five or 10 or maybe more. I don’t know, you tell me. And then you probably have to update it, you can’t just set it and forget it because…
0:31:30.6 Matt Montellione: No, you…
0:31:30.7 Kurt Baker: The content may change and it may not be appropriate anymore based on what you did a year ago may be totally wrong. [laughter]
0:31:37.8 Matt Montellione: Yep, well, and you’re right. One of the easiest ways is just to follow current events. So let’s say it’s February 8th or whenever the Super Bowl was, how the Super Bowl… What the Super Bowl means for your logistics company or just silly stuff. The reason people need a headline that’s catchy… You want it to invoke curiosity, ’cause that’s the only thing as humans that we pay attention to and something novel. So something that almost creates that cognitive dissonance in your mind and you’re like, “What’s going on here?” And you’ll realize it now that hopefully that I’m saying this, every single ad you click on, every single thing isn’t going to say, “Study shows that men buy this product 80% more than women.” It’s gonna say, “Who buys this product more men or women?” And that’s the headline.
0:32:17.4 Kurt Baker: Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s always a question, yeah.
0:32:21.1 Matt Montellione: That’s the headline, because that makes you click.
0:32:21.6 Kurt Baker: Sometimes it’s called click bait. [laughter]
0:32:23.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah, but…
0:32:24.5 Kurt Baker: But then there’s nothing on the back end.
0:32:26.3 Matt Montellione: No, I…
0:32:26.4 Kurt Baker: Sometimes you click through, you’re like, “Didn’t even answer the question.” [laughter]
0:32:27.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah, “What is on here?”
0:32:27.7 Kurt Baker: I didn’t…
[laughter]
0:32:28.7 Kurt Baker: Yeah.
0:32:28.7 Matt Montellione: You can get in trouble with some of that stuff, but the rest of it, every good ad, everything you click on on Facebook and Instagram, every news article you read on Google News or Apple News is written a certain way, and it’s to invoke curiosity. They wanna propose a question, invoke curiosity, and try to get you to click so you can consume the content and figure out… Your brain doesn’t like those open loops, those mysteries.
0:32:49.9 Kurt Baker: Yeah, right. Yeah, they’ll do a headline where they’ll say such and such is happening on… And then you’re like, “On what? I gotta click to find the rest of the article.” [laughter] Say, wait a minute.
0:32:57.2 Matt Montellione: Right. And you can go with just current events, current phenomenon TV shows, things that are going on in the news.
0:33:03.1 Kurt Baker: So, if you’re setting this up… I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but if you’re setting this up and like you’re doing current events, so… Okay, if I’m gonna do the Super Bowl and I’m in February, but people are going on every day, so am I doing this by the month, am I doing this by…
0:33:14.5 Matt Montellione: You’re doing this in real time, like, real time.
0:33:15.4 Kurt Baker: Oh, real time, and I’m changing my entire list of things I’m sending to people.
0:33:19.8 Matt Montellione: You’re literally just creating a single email twice a week.
0:33:22.5 Kurt Baker: Oh, single.
0:33:23.4 Matt Montellione: Right, rather than a cadence. You can have those auto responders that automatically do like specific updates, quarterly updates, all that fun stuff, but in the meantime, you’re literally writing two new emails a week.
0:33:33.3 Kurt Baker: So you’re literally saying write emails twice a week that are very specific, and then put that on the list. So this is definitely work, so you gotta set aside time to make sure you do this and do it correctly. Okay. Got it.
0:33:45.1 Matt Montellione: Yeah, but honestly, once you get good at this, it’s gonna take you no more than an hour a week to write two emails.
0:33:49.6 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:33:49.7 Matt Montellione: And it can be a story about something that happened in your life and how it relates to their type of business, ’cause usually people on your list have similar needs, wants, desires, so you can really do some cool stuff around what’s happening. If it’s something financial about what the government speech just meant. What Joe Biden’s Speech Means for Your 401K. That’ll got a zillion clicks because people are paranoid, they wanna know what’s going on. What did the speech…
0:34:15.3 Kurt Baker: Well, ’cause things… Yeah, things are always happening, right?
0:34:16.8 Matt Montellione: There you go.
0:34:17.6 Kurt Baker: Especially the political season, so you’re… Yeah, so the other quick question before we break is, are there certain days of the week that are best to send these out ’cause I hear all kinds of comments about, “Don’t send it out on this day. Do send it out… ” What are your thoughts about that?
0:34:29.8 Matt Montellione: There’s a lot of data that shows like Wednesday, Thursday, sometimes Sunday. The real answer is you just have to test it for your audience, like try different days and just look at the data. The data doesn’t lie. It’ll tell you how…
0:34:40.1 Kurt Baker: So, just keep modifying. So, I would assume you’d spread them like three days apart?
0:34:45.3 Matt Montellione: Yup.
0:34:45.4 Kurt Baker: So if you do a Monday, you do a Thursday, and if you do a Tuesday, you do a Friday. Just keep messing around with it till you figure out those two days that kind of work.
0:34:50.9 Matt Montellione: Right. The data will show you in your email sender like, “Hey, you got a 20% open rate.”
0:34:55.6 Kurt Baker: Follow the data.
0:34:57.1 Matt Montellione: Follow the data. It doesn’t lie.
0:34:58.4 Kurt Baker: Awesome. All right, we’re gonna take another quick break. You’re listening to Master Your Finances.
0:35:00.1 ANNOUNCER: Do you want to prevent this from happening to you? “And it’s gone. It’s all gone.” Listen closely as we now return to Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker of Certified Wealth Management and Investment.
0:35:13.7 Kurt Baker: Welcome back. You’re listening to Master your Finances. I am here with Matt Montellione, and we’re talking about different ways to market some specifics. As far as how to use email. Email is still a great way to connect with people as long as you do it correctly, we have to emphasize that, and that’s the problem is most people are not doing it correctly. And LinkedIn I think is a hugely underutilized platform that could be extremely valuable, again, if used correctly. And ultimately you wanna get this to a person to person at some point, because you have to connect, like a real person, and that’s when you actually can do any kind of connection as far as a relationship goes.
0:35:51.3 Kurt Baker: So I guess we’ll back up just a little bit, and then these are two key components but of a larger puzzle, which is really just I guess marketing in general. So how do you define marketing and what are your views on just the entire concept of that? Because I know when we have a cycle in the market itself, sometimes the traditional thing is, “Well, when things get bad, we cut the marketing budget, and when things are good, we increase the marketing budget.” Which honestly is usually the opposite of what you should be doing because when things are good, you’re probably gonna get money anyway. When things are bad, you probably should be going in. So what are your thoughts about how to budget and how to actually do marketing in general?
0:36:27.4 Matt Montellione: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with that. Most people constrict in bad times and cut marketing first, and part of the reason I think is this sort of older school mentality when you couldn’t actually attribute most of the advertising you were doing into sales. Like, you ran commercials, you have a billboard, like how could you possibly attribute sales to a billboard? Like, yeah, maybe if the person’s like, “Oh, ask them if they saw the billboard.” It’s almost impossible to attribute, but through modern marketing, you can attribute most things through tracking. There’s tracking pixels, there’s the Facebook Pixel that Google has tracking as well, so you can actually know that I spent $5 in ads and I produced a lead.
0:37:04.1 Matt Montellione: Now, that’s not a realistic number typically, depending on the size of your business, but you can start to see, “Wait a minute, I can have an understanding of this data,” and this data is how some of these companies that you’ve heard about have gone from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and the reason is is ’cause they have such a good grasp on their data, they understand… If everybody watched Shark Tank, it’s like, “How much does it cost you to acquire a customer?” And if you don’t know that number…
0:37:26.5 Kurt Baker: Right. They talk about that all the time, they talk about that all the time, “You’re done.”
0:37:29.0 Matt Montellione: You’re done. Like, walk out of the Tank.
0:37:31.7 Kurt Baker: Yeah, yeah, every time, every time.
0:37:31.8 Matt Montellione: You’re kicked out. And the reason they want them to understand that is because if you can actually profit on the front end of acquiring customers, even if you acquire the customer for free, meaning you break even, you can just acquire unlimited customers ’cause you’re gonna get the exact amount of money back the next day. It’s really easy in e-commerce to attribute ’cause it’s like, “Okay, I spent money on Facebook ads, I had 700 people come to the site, 48 of them bought, it was $600 worth of stuff and I had spent $300 on ads. My profit margin’s 50%.” It’s really easy to do math in that regard.
0:38:00.2 Matt Montellione: In the B2B world, it’s much harder ’cause it’s like, “Okay, I had this many leads, but my sales cycle is eight months long, so I have to actually track how long it takes.” So it’s much more difficult to spend unlimited money on ads in B2B because you have a budget and you have to be able to recoup your money, which takes months oftentimes, if not years. But in some of these businesses, especially transactional businesses, I recommend that you have no marketing budget, an unlimited marketing budget if it’s profitable, and the reason I say that is, it’s like if you know for sure that you spend $20 on ads and you get a $100 worth of profit on your e-commerce site, why would you have a marketing budget of $1000 a month? You literally are just cutting yourself at the knees, like, okay…
0:38:44.1 Kurt Baker: So, just keep stepping it up.
0:38:47.3 Matt Montellione: Yeah, and you don’t jump up to, like, “Oh perfect, I’m gonna spend a million dollars this month.”
0:38:48.7 Kurt Baker: No.
0:38:49.9 Kurt Baker: You still need a margin.
0:38:49.9 Kurt Baker: You’d still need a profit margin. [laughter]
0:38:50.6 Matt Montellione: Right, you’d still need… Move it up slowly, but the ability for companies now to spend money on ads, and ads are just like leverage. I started to study this a lot, and it’s really an interesting concept. Leverage is everything to a business. You can leverage labor, meaning people can do work. Like you’re only one person at the top.
0:39:06.8 Kurt Baker: Like when you fix up a house or whatever, right?
0:39:08.9 Matt Montellione: Yeah. [laughter] Right. You need people to do it. You need people to do work. But now you have the leverage of paid media, which is unlimited leverage, where if I wanna have these one-to-one conversations, which I think is awesome in B2B and super required, but there’s another side of the coin, which is also really important, especially for consumer brands, where I can pay Zuckerberg or the guys at Google money so that they show my ad, they show my content, they show everything about me and my value prop, and I can leverage that so I can get in front of way more people than I ever could before. Like before, advertising was really just for super big companies. “So what do I do?” Get a radio commercial or a TV ad or a billboard. All that was super expensive. A magazine. That was reserved for super big companies.
0:39:53.3 Kurt Baker: And generally harder to track, too.
0:39:55.5 Matt Montellione: Harder to track, and for big companies. But now, you can create an ad on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Google for pretty inexpensive… Some industries are obviously more than others, and you can actually start to track your results and all of a sudden you can have a consistent customer acquisition strategy, ’cause that’s one of the hardest things. People don’t know where their next customer is coming from, and I used to be in that boat too. You didn’t know, but once you have a predictable system where it’s like, “I know I’m gonna get to about 20 leads a month from this strategy, we’re gonna convert 10% of them into customers, an average customer is worth this much,” you start to break down the math and you realize the type of business you can build when you understand some of that data, if that makes sense.
0:40:29.2 Kurt Baker: No, it definitely makes sense. So, wow. Yeah, so how do you… You just talked about some of the paid advertising, and one of the things that always come up for me if we’re talking about OLA, is like how do you figure out what are the best key words or phrases to use in your business? Because sometimes you’re like, “Oh, that’s a popular word, but it’s really, really expensive, and this is maybe not as popular, but I can do more.” And so I guess that’s through the testing aspect, so how do you try to figure out what’s actually working for you, and how often do you go back in and make adjustments and things like that?
0:40:57.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah, that’s a great question. So there’s kind of like those two forms of online advertising. One is intent-based, which is what you’re talking about, meaning like I have the need for a plumber, and plumbers near me, and probably an immediate need usually if it’s a plumbing issue. So, that is really important and expensive to be at the top because people are gonna pay big bucks ’cause it’s immediate need, you’re making a split-second decision, there’s water coming out of your roof, you don’t have the time. Where the other form of advertising, which is really new, and the first time it happened was a TV commercial, and I won’t get into it too much, but basically, you’re interrupting someone’s day with something based on who you believe they are, like their customer persona. That’s like Facebook and Instagram ads, TikTok ads, what have you. They didn’t search for something specifically, but you are interrupting them because you believe they are the type of person to buy a BMW, so BMW has an ad…
0:41:47.2 Kurt Baker: It sounds like AI stuff to me.
0:41:48.3 Matt Montellione: Oh, it all is. It’s crazy.
[laughter]
0:41:50.5 Kurt Baker: They know more about me than I do.
0:41:51.6 Matt Montellione: Yeah, so instead of paying for those expensive keywords, maybe you target everybody who likes BMWs on Facebook and lives in a wealthy zip code. You can do all that crazy targeting on Facebook or Instagram and other platforms, so you interrupt their day and rather than a little text-based ad, you have a video of a BMW and going fast or the interior of it and whatnot. And that’s why you see all those ads because they’re figuring out who you are as a person, your persona, rather than what you’re typing in. They almost like… And do you ever think like, “They’re listening to me”?
0:42:21.4 Kurt Baker: It’s scary sometimes. They throw things in front of you.
0:42:22.5 Matt Montellione: I believe they’re listening too, but people say they’re not.
0:42:25.0 Kurt Baker: They probably are.
0:42:26.1 Matt Montellione: But they have to be. They say they’re not, but they’re so good at predicting ’cause they know so much about you, so much data about me and you as people and everyone that they’re putting ads in front of you of things you really would like.
0:42:35.3 Kurt Baker: Well, sometimes they put in things in front of you that you hadn’t even thought of. It’s like, “Wait a minute.” [laughter]
0:42:40.0 Matt Montellione: Yup, they’re so good. They know your personality.
0:42:42.6 Kurt Baker: Like, “That’s actually pretty interesting. I never thought I would be interested in that.”
0:42:45.5 Matt Montellione: Yup, they’re really good, and I’m a sucker for those ads. I buy all of them, pretty much.
0:42:48.5 Kurt Baker: You buy all of… [laughter]
0:42:51.3 Matt Montellione: Oh my God. I’m like this is…
0:42:51.4 Kurt Baker: You’re helping with the business model.
0:42:52.4 Matt Montellione: I’m like this is… I’m like, “I love this stuff.” I love good ads. I can’t help it ’cause I’m just in this world, and I appreciate them a lot.
0:42:58.2 Kurt Baker: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So the new thing is they’re really reading your customer persona. So how do I figure that out for myself? If I’m a business with… B2B is your speciality, so how do I figure out the customer persona of that purchasing agent or the director or whatever the case may be? How do I understand who that person might be?
0:43:17.4 Matt Montellione: Yeah, kind of like survey your existing customers and put that data in there and like, “Okay, let’s look at every customer we have. Is there any trends? Are they all men or all women or all a certain age, or all a certain college level, or they all drive certain cars, or they all three kids? You can start to try to put together some of this data and have a pretty good idea, and then when you put your targeting together, you use all of that, which is why the ads that come to me are different than come to you, then different that come to somebody else, because they’re so good at laser targeting who they’re going after, especially big companies now. But I think in all honesty, eyeballs are only gonna get more expensive because it’s not a problem… The only thing that matters right now is attention. It’s like the new… It’s the new oil. Your attention is what’s valuable, your attention is what makes money, everybody’s attention.
0:44:02.9 Matt Montellione: So if you can get attention for cheap, you can basically outdo your competition ’cause they’re not doing it yet. And even the big brands are underspending, I think, and they’re all coming around and realizing, “Can I spend $5 million on a Super Bowl commercial or for $5 million on paid media, on social media, on Instagram, where everyone spends all their time, how many more eyeballs can I reach? How many more conversions can I have it?” So I think they’re starting to shift the budget there, and it’s a bidding system, so as they do, the costs will rise for all of us little guys and girls, so it’s really important to get in I think now and have a good strategy that works.
0:44:36.3 Kurt Baker: So then you can be the one that can actually spend the $5 million.
0:44:39.4 Matt Montellione: Right. Yeah, you wanna be that person.
[laughter]
0:44:40.6 Kurt Baker: So you gotta work on that now. Oh wow. So, awesome. So, marketing in general, so yeah. So what should we be doing as far as our… Where should we start?
0:44:50.5 Matt Montellione: I think the biggest thing is like marketing education. You wanna spend some time, energy and effort to really understand it. There’s a lot of cool courses out there that’ll teach you sort of the fundamentals of marketing, getting an understanding, trying to bring it in-house, but if you can’t, obviously you can look for a vendor that can help you with some of this stuff. But I’m a big believer that a business will only grow to the skills and character traits of the entrepreneur, so you have to acquire those skills and insource them inside your business. Whether you learn them or a key employee learns them, you have to bring that in-house if you really wanna control your own destiny.
0:45:23.0 Matt Montellione: So people invest in all these things, invest in stocks and bonds and crypto, but the best investments I’ve ever made in my life are in myself, just learning new skills. A skill will pay you forever. No one can take it away from you, like no government can tax it, you own that skill, you know how to do it, which is why you see these people that had everything, they lost it all, three years later, they have it all back because they have that skill that’s gonna produce that income and produce the revenue that they need.
0:45:49.9 Kurt Baker: Well, that was just awesome. We’re about ready to end the show here. Any last thoughts before we go? It’s been awesome, Matt.
0:45:54.7 Matt Montellione: No, I hope I provide some value for everybody, and I’m really happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
0:46:00.7 Kurt Baker: All right, Matt, we listened to Matt Montellione with Royce Brook Media, and it’s been awesome. We’ve learned… I learned a lot today. You’re listening to Master Your Finances. Have a wonderful day.
0:46:11.3 ANNOUNCER: That’s all for today’s episode of Master Your Finances. Miss Kurt Baker’s biggest money managing tip or even a full episode? Head on over to masteryourfinances.us or 1077thebronc.com/masteryourfinances. Look for Master Your Finances on Anchor, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time, only on 107.7 The Bronc.
