A (23:51)
Our question of the day comes from autumn in Richmond, Virginia. Hey Dave. There are so many marketing channels. Facebook, Google email, local partnerships, direct mail. I feel overwhelmed. How does a small business narrow it down to the one or two channels that actually matter? Well, depending on how small we are. You know, small, I guess is relative in this case. But the first thing I do and have always done back in the day when we were tiny even, is I said, okay, where are my customers? The customer profile, who is it I'm trying to get to and where do they live? And so, you know, is a Google keyword going to lead me to that exact person, that demographic, that age group, that income, that level of education, so on? Is email the best way to contact them? If you're looking for Gen Z, email's not gonna be it. They're going to be on text. All right. If you're looking for direct mail, you know, there's only some, only a handful of products that still do really well on direct mail. But direct mails kind of made a comeback. There was a couple of decades that we all kind of turned our nose up at it and said, jump in the creek, no direct mail. But there's some stuff that's actually moving right now really well with direct mail. But again, who is your contact point and what's the zip code you're dropping that direct mail into? And what's the demographic of that zip code? You can get all that information. So identify clearly the Persona of your customer. Our Customer is a 34 year old college educated female with two children and is married. If that's your, I mean, dial that in. Is that who is your customer? Who are you aiming at? And then you may figure out real quick, okay, our customer is an 18 year old. Well, they're not on Facebook. Don't waste a dime on Facebook. If you want 18 year olds, you might get on Instagram. You certainly are going to be on TikTok if you're looking for 18 year olds, but they're not. YouTube maybe, but they're not consuming. So, you know, Facebook is aging quick. It's gotten down to my wife, the 65 year old grandmother, trading pictures with the other grandmothers of the grandkids. And not quite, but man, I'm telling you, Facebook is not the babies, it's getting a little gray. So you Gotta decide. And you can learn that stuff. It's not hard to figure out. But get in there and figure out what your target is and where your target lives. And so, yeah, I'll give you an example in the old days and you wouldn't do this today and you didn't mention it. But a way of figuring that out is, okay, if we were going to buy radio, all right, are we going to buy urban rap? Is that where your customer is? Are we going to buy country music? Is that where your customer is? Might be surprised. They probably are if you're going to buy 70s light yacht rock. Okay, well that's where you'll find your boomers. And you're probably not going to get any 18 year olds there. Okay. So I mean the formatting on radio tells you where to go buy the ads in radio, if you were going to buy radio ads. And that's a clear example of what I'm talking about. Although what you're asking more about is a digital tool. And digital tools are the same way. They're bifurcated by again, education, age, consumption and those kinds of things. So another example is this. Average time spent listening on talk radio is around what used to be around 10 minutes. We had managed on the Ramsey show to get it up to about 18 minutes. We do a three hour show. So that's kind of insulting. Average time spent listening is 18 minutes. You draw it over onto podcasts. You know what your average time spent listening is? Almost 100%. They consume the whole thing because they turn it on and off. You guys don't listen to this all in one setting. Sometimes, sometimes you turn it on and off. You get it in and out of the car, it's on demand. You get in and off the treadmill, it's on demand. And so the consumption rate was almost pure on podcast and it wasn't on talk radio. So we knew when we were trying to get to our customers through our own broadcasts that were getting there. Oh, and by the way, podcast was a much higher educated, much higher income than talk radio was the consumer of. It was and probably still is. And so. And YouTube, what are you going to get on YouTube? Well, you know, I've learned a lot about YouTube that I didn't know over the years and now that YouTube is one of our big broadcast, you know, processes. So Spotify, what are you going to get there that's different than Apple, you know, and so all of those kinds of things, there is a difference. It's a different consumer, it's a Different person on the other end, different customer. And so who do you want to get and where do they live? Go where they live. Don't go looking for 65 year old white guys on urban rap. They're not there. And don't go looking for the cool kids anywhere except urban rap. That's where they are. And so go get the cool kids where they are. But who is it you're trying to sell to? And if you do that, it answers your question a lot. And then you can narrow it down and rule out some channels and then run some tests on the channels where you think they are live, the processes that they live. But and then run some test markets on it and you'll see pretty quick what your response rate is. And then you've got the solve the attribution problem is can I actually say that's where that came from. But you'll have to talk to your customers a lot to figure out where they really did hear about you. And so again, very clearly lay out your customer Persona and then find out where they live and go run some tests on those locations and that'll get you where you need to go. That's a good question, Autumn. I like that. I hadn't had that one in a long time. Owning a business can be a heavy load. You want to serve your customers well, make a healthy profit and grow. 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That's NetSuite.com Ramsey thanks for joining us on entree leadership. If you want to help us out, consider hitting the follow button or the subscribe button. Leave a Nice five star review. And of course, share this with a friend. Click the share button or cut the link out and send it to somebody. Go. Hey, this is actually actual real business advice. These guys can help you. They've helped me tell people about us. We really would appreciate it if you did that. Rachel's in Little Rock, Arkansas. Hi, Rachel. How are you?