Episode 2: "The Clinic Your Website Can't Live Without"

A Transcript For The Readers:

Rocket Shirts understands that most people are overwhelmed when ordering custom apparel for their first time. Shelby has created a simple and easy process to ensure customers get their branded apparel in days, and not weeks.  

Their average turnaround time of three to five days guarantees their customers can quickly “Get Shirt Done”, empowering the customer to do what they do best and let Rocket Shirts handle the rest.

With that, welcome Shelby to Success Stories!

Shelby Craig: [00:01:49]

Well, thank you for having me, Marshall. I am looking forward to hanging out with you today.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:01:54]

So before we get started with a bunch of questions and stuff, why don’t you just kind of talk about what you do there in Tennessee for your customers all the time.

Shelby Craig: [00:02:04]

Yeah, we “Get Shirt Done.”

I mean, that is our tagline. That’s what we kind of embrace. We saw, in this industry, the majority of people were taking two to three weeks to turn things around and we just found that that wasn’t acceptable. And so we started out in DTG world and then we branched into screen printing and then embroidery.

And last year we branched into promotional products. Not that you have to branch into that. We just had never touched it. So decided to do that. So, that is what we do.

I mean, we do things efficiently, quickly, and that’s kind of what has set us apart in a very crowded space in this area of central Tennessee.

There’s 12 screen printers in our city and we’re a city of 180,000 people.

So. it’s pretty crazy to see that many screen printers, but we all have our own niche and we’ve capitalized on that and we all support each other too, which is great. And, so I like that.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:03:09]

Well, that’s great. Who’s your market segment? Who are you targeting?

Shelby Craig: [00:03:15]

For us? We used to say until COVID-19, that we were primarily conferences, events, churches, and schools.

And those have kind of all stopped, but we really found our niche and our kind of foothold with making sure that we printed for conferences. And we do fulfillment for conferences as well. That that set us apart early on. We had agreements with a lot of conferences in his area that we would do a revenue split.

So we kind of took the risk. We would print 10,000 shirts and we would say we would sell it.

You get 40%, we get 60% of profit…and instead of paying for booth space.

They liked that. No risk, but great reward for them.

So that’s kind of where we started and also with churches and trade shows and things like that.  This is really where we just kind of went gangbusters for and that’s what we love. We can speak that language very easily.

I come from a seminary background. I come from a church background. I was a student pastor for nine years. I was a lead pastor for six years. Those are my people. And it’s not hard for me to sell to anyone in that market.

That’s where we started and it was a lot of fun and then COVIS took all those away. And so we have had to pivot in this time, but that’s our market for sure.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:04:51]

Yeah. And for those of you out there who heard “Get Shirt Done”, man, that’s an awesome tagline.

You have something to say to that, right?

Shelby Craig: [00:05:01]

That is ours. That is our trademark.

And many people use it, but it is ours. And we took the time to make that happen.

And we like using it in everything we do. We’ve got a new floor graphic that says let’s “Get Shirt Done” right in the center of our floor.

Everybody’s laughing out as they walk in.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:05:20]

That’s good. That’s good. All right. So let’s get busy with our topics here.

Are you ready?

Shelby Craig: [00:05:25]

Yeah.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:05:26]

Okay.

For listeners out there that don’t have a solid online strategy, what are the top few things that they need to investigate and get right?

Shelby Craig: [00:05:38]

Well, you asked me that question just before that…you said, what is your niche?

And I think that for a solid online strategy, we don’t think oftentimes that we need a niche, but we do.

We need to understand who our customer is.

I think it’s more important that before we focus on what is our online strategy is, we first need to ask who our customer is.  Who is going to buy our product?

You know, I’ve talked this morning, with you in regards to asking a question.

Not, can we make the customer say yes…but can the customer make us say yes?  

Do they fit our profile?

Do they fit our avatar of who we want to do business with?

And once you understand that once you understand who your customer is and what your customer wants, then you can start communicating clearly on an online strategy.

Anything before that is just noise.

And so for us, we understand who our customer is. We understand what they want to buy.

And then we also understand what problem we have to solve in order for them to achieve what they want.

When you understand those three things on the forefront, then you can guide them along the way to getting the results that they want, whether that is for an event…what would that be for a conference?  What would that be for a school? A sports team?

When you understand the problems they’ve had to overcome to get what they’ve been getting, whether that is with long turnarounds, whether that is the right type of garment, whether that is when designs that aren’t stellar.

Whatever that problem is…maybe it’s just turnaround time.

That seems to be a bottleneck in this industry of just getting it fast enough.  You know, in this Amazon world of two days, you can get anything in two days.  This Amazon world is expecting that in two days.

And so when we say two, three, four weeks, I just talked to a customer that said, “Oh, the last guy told me seven weeks,” that’s a problem.

And we have to solve that. So when you understand that problem, then you can start guiding your customer online to becoming the problem solving business.

When you asked what are the things that we really need to investigate and get right?

Understand your customer, who they are, what they want and the problem they have to overcome to achieve, and then guide them in everything that you do with your social media posts.

When you add one of the things that, and we will get to this in a little bit.  So stop me if that’s the case, but one of the most powerful things you can do for an online strategy is asking questions to your audience and almost segmenting them with those questions. And it doesn’t have to be questions that are even pertinent to this industry, pertinent to t-shirts, or pertinent to promo.

Where it can be as easy as, “Hey, what’s your favorite thing to binge watch on Netflix?”

And then you begin building an avatar of wow.

A lot of people on social media, like “Stranger Things”, a lot of people on social media really like “Friends”, well, that’s an avatar. And then you start understanding who your audience is just a little bit more and you can start segmenting those people and start selling towards those people and to the things that they enjoy, because people who like “Stranger Things” will not be the same people who probably like “Friends” or maybe they do.

And so figuring out that niche and, putting those together. So we ask a lot of questions. Even in emails, when we send emails out, we’ll ask a question so we can get a response and we can start a conversation.

So, understanding your customer, understanding what they want, understanding what problem they have to solve to overcome them, and then painting that picture of success.

And also painting that picture of failure, because if nothing’s at stake for not doing business with you, they don’t really have to do business with you.  They can go anywhere and get the service that you offer.

Because there’s nothing at stake for not doing business with you. And so you have to paint that picture of failure as well.

And we think, well, should we talk about failure?

Should we talk about the negatives?

Should we talk about the “No’s?”

And I’m not saying be a Debbie downer.  What I’m saying is what’s at stake by not doing business with you, and if there’s nothing at stake, then why should they do business with you?

At Rocket Shirts again, what’s the failure not doing business with us?

Well, you’re going to take weeks to get your shirts.

It may not be right.  It may be printed incorrectly.

You may miss your event.

You may miss your deadline and life’s too short to miss your deadline. There’s too much at stake.

Your attendees deserve a better experience.

Your attendees deserve things. And now we’re talking about empathy by using the words, it’s a philosophical problem that we’re overcoming.

They deserve a better experience. They ought to not feel the way they feel being overwhelmed and ordering shirts.

Do you have an event to plan? Let us take care of the rest.

So that’s some things I think you need to investigate, and that goes into this kind of whole idea of StoryBrand right. And that’s what I live and breathe and drink and eat.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:10:57]

StoryBrand, by the way, is the book by Donald Miller in case you’ve never read that.

Shelby Craig: [00:11:02]

That’s correct. Yeah. Donald Miller, the Don has I call him.

No. He wrote a book and it’s nothing new, everything in that book was written 2,500 years ago by Aristotle and poets.

I mean it is the elements of story.

I watched a movie last night and my wife’s like, who’s this person? And I was like, Oh, well this is the guy that’s being introduced. And let me tell you how it’s going to end. And she’s like, no, you are ruining movies for me. I’ve ruined more movies for her than I’ve helped because I know exactly what’s going to happen within the first 30 minutes.

StoryBrand by Donald Miller and I’ve been a StoryBrand certified guide, for awhile and it’s what I live and breathe.

Everything that we do goes through that lens.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:11:48]

And how this is relevant here…especially if we’re talking websites, we’re talking customers.

It’s all about clarity, right?

Shelby Craig: [00:11:57]

Yeah. Yeah. No one wants to know that you started your business in 1975.

You know, I do a lot of website audits for screen printers. People ask me, can you just look at my website? And, you know, I’d looked at one a few weeks ago and it was a picture of their building. It was a nice building. It was beautiful.

And it was there in their header and it says started in 1975, to meet the custom printed needs of our community.

But all I saw was the building.

I thought where they were real estate company?  Like, are they are commercial real estate company? What is this? And no one really cares about your story.

StoryBrand is all about helping you understand that you’re not the hero of your story, your customer’s the hero. And you’re just the guide.

And I think that that is, you know, one of the things. We, we did the “Here For Good” campaign in March, April and May and are still doing it. We’re landing that plane, coming up soon.

And I think one of the beautiful things of why that campaign was so successful nationwide is because for the first time a screen printer was not the hero.

They were the guide and the customer was the hero to these small businesses that we were helping. And it was a beautiful picture to watch happen.

We were the guide.

We were the person that gave an avenue, a platform, to be able to make the customer, the person who wants to patronize the business that they love.

We were the guide that allow that person to be hero with a $20 t-shirt to help a small business, stay alive and thrive.

That’s StoryBrand.

And when you look at your website, what is within the first five seconds, does your person know who you are?

Does your customer know who you are, what you do and what problem you solve, and if they can’t solve those, if they can’t pass what we call the grunt test since the rebrand, if it can’t pass the grunt test, it can’t answer those three questions within five seconds.

Then you failed because you’re, it’s too confusing.

Oftentimes we have a lot of things in the right hand corner, top right hand corner of our website…about us…contact us.

No one really cares about you.

I would be. That sounds horrible. But I would mentioned to say that there’s not many people that click the “About Us.”

We always say have a very clear call to action.

And top right hand corner, we look up in the top left hand corner of who you are, and we need to look in the top right hand corner to know what we do.

And so what we call the call to action, call them out.

Because if you’re not telling your customers where to go, they have no idea where to go.

And if it’s the “Contact Us”, what does that mean?

I really don’t want to contact you. I just wanna get an answer to my problem.

I’m going to get a solution to my problem.

And so for us, we’ve really cleaned up our website. It’s almost a one pager and people think we’re crazy, but we average 650 to 700 quote requests a month.

And we converted about 80% of those because it’s very clear on what you’re to do.

There’s only one button to push on our entire website and that is to get a quote and everything else falls into what we call the junk drawer to the very bottom of your website.

Everything. The “About Us”, the “Contact Us”.  That’s your story, what services you offer, all of that needs to go on the bottom of your website.

That’s what we call the junk drawer. Everybody’s got a junk drawer in their house. We open it up. That’s where everything is and we know it’s there. We know it’s there. We know what’s in it.

If I need to know where my toenail Clippers are, it’s in the junk drawer, we go to that drawer.

And so we need to pull that drawer. That’s where everything else kind of sits.

But if I need to know where the milk is or where those things are, it’s very clear. That is that’s in the fridge. That’s where I need to go.

Likewise, with our website, we have a very clear call to action. I’m a direct call to action, whatever that is for you.

If it’s calling you, if it’s getting a quote, if it’s submitting artwork, whatever that looks like for you and your industry and your business and whatever you offer, it needs to be clear. And likewise, we need to have a transitional call to action. Something that gets them. If they’re not ready to commit.

I talk about the call to action being the “Will you marry me?” aspect of our website. If you asked a woman at a cocktail party, will you marry me? She probably will say no 80% of the time, maybe not, but

Marshall Atkinson: [00:16:18]

…unless it was a really swinging party!

Shelby Craig: [00:16:21]

it depends on the party, but you know, always listen…here let me go back.

When you look at your website. Think about it as that cocktail party, you would never go up to someone at a cocktail party. Now wish that none of this is an audio recording.

If you could see me, you could see this, but imagine you’re standing in a bar and a girl comes up and you look at her and you go, “Let’s get started!”

You’re probably not going to go very far with her. Or you look at her and you kind of brush yourself and say, “Would you like to learn more?”

But those are two call to actions that we do on websites all the time!

We say, “Get Started” or “Learn More.”

I don’t know, what’s on the other side of those and it’s required a commitment of me that I’m unsure if I want to make, but if we’re clear and concise, then we know exactly what happens.

I spoke at a Chamber of Commerce event here in town, and we talked about marketing. We talked about websites and one of the things that I did in the very beginning is that no one knew who I was. I was some young kid for all their sake because they’re all old money people in this area learning about their websites.

And I want stage a way to introduce me. I get up on stage and I said, all right, I’m glad you guys are here. Thanks for coming. My name is Shelby Craig, and I want you to do one thing for me. I want you to stand up, turn around. I want you to walk out this back door and meet me on the steps at the corner.

And so I mobilized 50 people, very quickly. And everyone’s turned around, walked outside. Once in a street corner and I’ve got on the street corner. I said, I want to tell you something very important.

People will always go where you tell them to go.

Now let’s turn around and go back into the room. And everybody was mad.

It was cold. January.  

Everybody was mad, but then they realize what I was doing.

We all went back into the room and I helped them understand that when we go to our website, if we’re not telling them exactly what to do. They’ll never have a call to action. They’ll never do anything.

And I had mobilized 50 people only because I had authority, which as a screen-printer, as a decorator, as an apparel decorator, we have authority already because someone’s coming to you because they don’t know how to do what you do and you’re the expert.

So we already have that authority. And as an authority piece, we tell them what to do, “Get a Quote”, or “Give Us Your Artwork” or “Call Us Now.”

Those are three things that we can do very quickly to be able to get the process started. Likewise, at that event? I mobilized 50 people only because I was very clear on what I told them to do.

Go walk, turn around, walk out this door, down the steps and meet me on the street corner. I have something important to tell you, and I mobilized 50 people that didn’t have a clue who I was.

We’ve got to do that. We have 50 people a day going to our website, and we’ve got to tell them exactly where we want them to go.

In order to get them to the place that they need to go to have that picture of success.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:19:12]

That’s fantastic. And what I really like about that, and this comes from Donald Miller’s book is “If you confuse you lose.”

So you make it so simple just by having one button. Click here, get a quote, right?

There’s only one thing to do.

That’s the call to action.

So you’re being crystal clear about what you want, that person who comes to your website to do. And I think this could work for a lot of people because I been to these websites and it’s just a giant confusing mess of stuff.

And it’s like, what am I supposed to do with all this?

I don’t even know.

So this is what I call it Shelby…I call it “Skillet to the head simple”.  Just like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with wham, you know, it’s right in your face.

This is exactly what I want you to do, do this right now.

You’re going to have much greater results, right?

Shelby Craig: [00:20:13]

Yep. Yeah. And if you’re confused by going to people’s websites and this industry, and you’ve been in industry for a long time, how much more confusing is our average customer.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:20:27]

Well, here’s the other thing you can look at…if is your website, is it built to make money or is it just a glorified business card?

Shelby Craig: [00:20:38]

Yeah. And you don’t want those.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:20:40]

It’s fine. If you just want it as a business card. That’s okay.

But if it’s designed to make you money, how much money is it generating or are you even measuring that?

So this is something that I think we’re going to get into here with the next question, but there’s something for you if you’re listening right now and wants you to be thinking about that.

Shelby Craig: [00:21:01]

Yeah.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:21:03]

Okay. So. Let’s just focus on websites.

So how should companies be thinking about retooling their website?

Because we were just talking about that in this challenging time. And what are the top successful ways that they need to drive traffic to this site?

‘Cause we need eyeballs, Shelby

Shelby Craig: [00:21:22]

Yeah. I mean, okay. So had you asked this question in January this year, I would have probably given you a different answer than I would today.

Our website needs to be very clear.

If so, if you’re listening to this, I want you to picture your website now, and I’m just going to walk you through the five things that your website needs in order to convert. And we want to turn clicks into customers.

The very, the top left hand corner needs to have your logo of authority, who you are.  You know, for Nike, the top of the same corner is Nike’s logo. And along with that, it needs to be exactly what you do.

Top right hand corner needs to be your call to action, whatever that is for you and your company. For us, it’s “Get a Quote” for some it’s “Book Now”, or a “Book An Appointment.” For others, it’s “Get A Call.”

The very top header of your website…of every website, it’s what I call above the fold.

If you go to Starbucks tomorrow morning and you look at the New York Times, it’s sitting there, the Wall Street Journal…it’s folded in half. And the main headline that you see is what they want you to know.

It’s above the fold.

It doesn’t require you to do anything.

It doesn’t require you to flip the paper over.

Does it require you to read more? It’s there. It’s a very clear headline and for you in our, in our business, your headline needs to be that right there.

And that top header, that very first thing they see needs to be your headline.

For us, it’s “Custom Printed Apparel in Days, Not Weeks”

Now, what does that do?

It tells the customer exactly what we do and what problem that we solve.

And then right below that is our call to action. So it’s a header. With your clear call of what you’re doing, who you are, what you do and how to give you money.

Those are the three things they need to do.

Then second, “Custom Printed Apparel in Days, Not Weeks”, and right below that, the call to action is “Get A Quote”

If you do nothing else, just put those things into your website. I promise that you’ll see more conversion.

Below that a little bit further below is the next thing, what we call below the fold.

So now we’re flipping a newspaper over, revving the scroll a little bit, below.

That is what we call your authority piece. You need to have, your sense of authority.

People who’ve done business with you, maybe reviews, testimonials, things that you want to see.  This establishes authority and right underneath that, again, your call to action.

And then we want to talk about maybe the agreement.  What steps you’re going to take, because oftentimes we won’t get a quote, because we don’t know what to expect.

I’m afraid to give you my information because I don’t know what’s going to happen on the other side of this button. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

So lay it out.

Very clear.

Step one.

You’re going to give us your information.

Step two, we’re going to give you a quote and step three, you’re going to pay or whatever your expectation is for us.

And we want to think in processes of threes.  

One is enough.

Two is too many.

Three is just right

Four, there’s too much.

Five is okay.

Our brains thinking on numbers, and so we’re okay with one, two, three.

We’re not okay with one, two.

There’s not closure for some reason. The brains think that way.

If there’s one thing that they have to do, great. If there’s two things they have to do, add a third one for the sake of just closure of our brains.

Four seems too cluttered. Five is okay.  Because again, it’s an odd number.

So I always see five steps, seven steps, nine ways, three things. I’m in lead-generating PDFs. All those are odd numbers because that’s how our brains think.

So clearly lay that out underneath that again, call to action. And then down towards the bottom, you want to have what we call a transitional call to action.

“Hey, are you not ready to commit?”

“Are you not ready to get married?” So to speak?

“Can we at least date a little bit?”

And you can, ask for their email or phone number, in exchange for some assets. And so when we have those things kind of in place, there’s only one thing they can do on your website is to get a quote and you’ve explained every step of the way, how to do business with you, what problem you solve and who you are.

So that’s, if you had to retool your website, that’s what I would do now in post COVID-19.

I would recommend that you give some form of empathy in that, maybe before your authority piece, before you establish authority, you actually give empathy to your customer.

Something like…use words like “We understand”, or “We know”, or “We feel you”. Words that you want to use to establish empathy, because we’re all unsure what’s going on and your customers coming to you probably are unsure if they even need t-shirts and you might want to call that out.

“We understand that you may not feel like things are right.”

“We understand that you need shirts for your event, but you’re not sure if it’s going to happen.”

Give that empathy to establish that you understand your customer.

We’re not asking them for the sale. We’re asking to be their guide.

We’re asking to guide them to make their event successful, to make their business thrive, to make their restaurant grow, to make their bar the best bar in town.

That’s what we’re asking permission to do.  And we do that through the process of t-shirts.

So I would retool our website in those things. And again, if you change nothing else, make sure that you have a clear call to action, take everything else away on the top right hand corner of your menu, have a very clear headline of who you are, what you do and what problem they solve and, and how they give you money.

That’s what the call to action is. Um, and. And if you change nothing else, change that on your website.

And then how do we drive traffic to that? Once we’ve got a clear plan, once we understand our clear message, what should we know? What is clear in our world?

And, and what are once we know who our customer is, what problem they have to solve and how we can guide them along the way, and what empathy we have to give and what success looks like for them?

When we understand those things of our customer. It is very clear to drive traffic to that.

Driving paid traffic to a website, that’s confusing and is a waste of money.

It happens all the time. We’d throw dollars at Facebook and go, well, Facebook marketing doesn’t work.

Well, it doesn’t work because your landing page is horrible.

It doesn’t work because you’ve dumped him on the homepage and it’s a picture of your building and they don’t understand what to do.

You’ve dumped them on the homepage and it’s a bunch of pictures of t-shirts that you printed.

No one really cares. What t-shirts you printed? They care about the t-shirt you’re about to print for them.

And that may sound harsh, but when we take photos of tee shirts on a floor, when’s the last time you threw your t-shirt on the floor and decided to take a picture of it?

No one does that. So stop it. So, just stop it.

Don’t have pictures of what you’ve done.  Paint a picture of what success looks like if they do business with you as well. And that could be through a printed tee shirt, but that’s not the main focal point.

So Facebook marketing, it will never work when we dumped them onto our home page, when there’s no clear call to action.

So, how do we drive traffic for Rocket Shirts?  We do a lot of Facebook marketing.

We will drive traffic to that and through paid marketing of either messenger or just direct call to action.

My personal page is a lot that’s free. Let me backtrack too. That’s the beauty of marketing, right?

Like when we understand how to clearly communicate to our customer.

Who we are, what we do and what problem we solve.

Those words are, will always be free. They’re extremely free because it doesn’t cost you anything to say those things. And it’s free when your customers can tell their friends what you do, who you are and how to give you money.

And so “Get Shirts Done.”

If you go to Facebook and in our local market, you know, local groups, who do you get teachers from to go to Rocket Shirts?

They get shirts done in days, not weeks, I’m not paying for that. That’s free. Um, it’s always free and they’re clearly communicating because we’ve clearly taught them what to say.

So how do we drive traffic to that Facebook marketing for us right now? Facebook marketing is cheap.

The ad cost is cheap for every dollar that we’ve been giving Facebook, we’ve been getting about $8 back, which is if I can rinse and repeat that, I’ll never have to worry about money.

It’s the ad cost is very cheap right now. And so we drive a ton of traffic through Facebook alone.

We don’t really pay for Google. Some people have great success with that, but we don’t really need to because we ranked number one or number two in our city and our area, because our message is coherent across social media, on our website, in our blogs and our emails on back links and things like that.

Everything is exactly the same.

And when that happens, you naturally are ranked higher because your content is all relevant across all platforms. And so that’s one way that you can do that. That’s one way you can drive traffic is through social media, word of mouth.  

Make the domain easy to remember. Make it easy for them to be able to share.

We own the domain, http://www.getshirtdone.net. We’re trying to buy.com, but another screen printer in Florida owns that.

So in time, we’ll get it, but we make it very easy for our customers to be able to do that. And if your website homepage is nothing more than a lead magnet of getting quotes, they can remember your website too.

So you want to make it easy for them to be able to onboard people, and I always say, if my grandmother can make a sale for me, I have one, my 87 year old grandmother points people to our website all the time. And gets more referral bonuses than almost anyone else in our company. And she’s 87.

That’s when you know, you’ve nailed it.

When it comes to clarity and an ease ability for your customer, it’s like, I rambled a little bit, but that’s okay.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:31:38]

We want to make things easy. I still think I read once was “so that a four-year old or a German shepherd could understand it.”

So it can’t be complicated.

Shelby Craig: [00:31:49]

Yeah. So we use, in StoryBrand words, we use the “grunt test.”

Can a caveman go to your website and know exactly what to do?

You know, Geico had that whole campaign, “It’s so easy. A caveman can do it.”

Well, there was truth to that. There was truth to that because if a caveman can do it, you know, then maybe anyone can do it.

And now in today’s times, maybe that’s considered inappropriate, but…

Marshall Atkinson: [00:32:17]

Use less words and more icons, right?

So I’ve been to lots of websites and there must be 700 words on the webpage about this whole huge story by telling all this stuff, when they could have just had a picture of a click here to get art with a paintbrush or something.

So we want to make it easy for people to instantly know what to do in like a millisecond.

And so that’s what I think you’re talking about, correct?

Shelby Craig: [00:32:49]

Yeah. And again, within three to five seconds who you are, what you do and how to give you money, if they can know those things, you don’t have to worry about anything else.

And that happens on the front page, like the very top of your website.

So that’s so important to be able to clearly communicate those things. And it’s not about we print t-shirts with water based ink and, and in the softness of the print…no one cares.

Oh, they care that they’re going to get their shirts on time, every time, and on the first time.

And that’s really what they care about.

Are they going to make that deadline, for their event?  

You know, are they going to reach the audience that they want?

Is their business going to thrive? And whatever your niche is, make sure that you’re communicating to that. Not to everybody.

You know, I spoke to someone the other day, “who’s your clothing line for?”

They said, “everybody,”…I thought you’ll never going to make it kid.

You’re just not because we’ve got to be clear.

So if I worked with a screen printer in California, and his niche is agricultural businesses. He’s got three or four high. Like if I said their names, you’d be like, Oh my gosh, he’s got like three large accounts that he does business with all the time.

And he wants more of those customer profiles.

And so we wouldn’t put pictures of a tee shirt on his website. We put pictures of what it looks like to be in the field of agricultural. We look like what we put pictures of people wearing tee shirts in the field, picking strawberries, because that’s who his profile as to his customer avatar is, and we want to communicate towards that.

If someone else comes to your website, they can understand who you are, but we want people like that niche, that customer avatar to be doing more business with us.

So, yeah. Clear clarity is King. I’m confused. You lose.

Clarity is King when it comes to anything that you do and say don’t ramble.

80% of people didn’t read a book last year and other 20% of the people that did almost none of them finished one. And so less words is most important when it comes to emails, when it comes to, um, your website, when it comes to even social media posts clear, and to the point.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:35:08]

Okay, so let’s switch it up a little bit and let’s talk about search.

So search is constantly changing.

What tools or tricks are using to get families days. And I, and I didn’t put this on the question sheet I sent you, but I want to throw in voice search as part of that.

Shelby Craig: [00:35:25]

Oh gosh. Well, to be fair, I. I’m not an SEO guy. And that sounds crazy what we have found for us. And I can only talk about what we’ve done right, and obviously what we’ve done wrong.

We moved a few years ago. So we had to clear up a lot of things when it came to light to our address, making sure that your information is consistent across all bases is very key to search.

Blogging is important. I know that sounds crazy, and it’s hard for us as screen printers.

We don’t like writing. We hate writing.

So pay someone to do that.

I would recommend writing a blog a month.  When it pertains to our industry that elevates you as two things, it makes you the expert and it becomes a lead magnet.

It becomes something they share. And so if you can elevate yourself as the expert, there’s this expectation they have to do business with you because no one else knows how to do what you’re doing.

Blog is important for search and when you can do back links, that’s important too.

We paid a service, an SEO service, for about six months that really just kicked it in gear for us. And they provided back links. They provided blog articles. They made sure that all of our stuff was consistent across all platforms and all the listings.

And I think that’s important, because if someone’s doing a search and then there’s this authority piece that you’re name and websites on a gazillion different websites.

And not like spam websites, but white pages, yellow pages, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram, all your information is consistent.

Twitter, LinkedIn, across the board, you’re going to rank higher and I think that’s an easy tool.

Shelby Craig: [00:37:41]

Okay. So an SEO company that we use that I think is that has been perfect for us.

They are low monthly costs. It’s called Kickass SEO, and their website is https://smallbusiness-seo.com/kick-ass-seo/.

I think for like 200 bucks a month, they’ll do the bare minimum for you of making sure that all your information is consistent across the board and that you’re ranking.

And we went from being like 15th on search engine optimization to like one and two.

Very quickly. And it was just because our stuff was consistent.

Another tool that we use for just blogging and scheduling things is Buffer, https://buffer.com/. And we use that for social media. We use that for blog posts and just content.

There’s a paid version of that too, where you can have pre kind of pre curated things and articles that share. It’s okay not to share. It’s okay. Not to write your own blog, if you want to share things that are pertinent to our industry on social media, and share those also on your website. That’s okay too.

Shelby Craig: [00:40:14]

Okay. Another trick that we do is when we ask for reviews, every order that comes through our system, when it is marked as shipped or picked up, it will request a review.

For our website, we send them to Google or Yelp. We alternate those back and forth on a month to month basis. That’s also how we’re one of the highest rated companies in our city, which helps in search engine optimization.

We have more reviews on Google than all 12 of our screen printers combined in our city, because we ask for it.

Again, people go where you tell them to go.

So we asked for that review, but here’s the little trick to when we respond to that review.

We also try to help our customer out.

One of our customers left the review and we said, thanks for your positive review. We hope that you and your business, and for this company was https://www.scrubs.com/, can grow and be successful.

So we thanked them. We put them in there, and then it’s so it’s linking scrubs.com to us. So then when you go to search for them sometimes. We pop up in searching for our customers, which is kind of cool. And so that’s just a small trick that we’ve done in our replies.

One of the things we always respond, one of the things that we do at Rocket Shirts is we always respond to every review that comes in, whether it’s positive or negative on every platform. We try to, you know, to knock those out.

And one of the tools that we use for that is https://reviewerpro.com/.

My favorite thing about this software is it provides a link that you can send out in a email that allows them to leave a review, and then they can choose which platform to post it to.  As opposed to just dropping them on your Google page and then hoping they’ll click, write a review.

It pre-populates that, and it also allows if it’s anything less than three stars, you can make it where it comes to you instead of going to the platform.  So you can kind of resolve that.

And, I know Google had a lot of things with GDRP and making sure that you can’t do that, but reviewer pro has made it where it’s compliant.

And also allows you to be able to start the conversation. So we’ve not had a three star review, but I did test it and it does come back. To make sure that they’re four and five star reviews and anything less than that, you need to address an issue and take care of that.  And so it allows you to do that. So that’s one of the software that we use, I think can help in your search engine optimization as well.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:44:20]

Okay, good. So let’s wrap up our discussion and let’s talk about Facebook Pixels.

So I think a lot of people are really lost when it comes to this.

How do I do it?

Why don’t we build an ad? What is, how am I cloning an audience? What does that even mean?

And I know you do a lot of this stuff. So get people started with the right way to use this tool.

Shelby Craig: [00:44:45]

First of all, um, don’t be scared of Facebook and Facebook marketing. I hear so often, this doesn’t work.

It’s too complicated.

It’s too difficult.

So let me answer the question. What is it? What is a Facebook pixel?

A Facebook pixel is a piece of data that is on your website, that when someone visits your website, it captures that data and kind of stores it for a little bit.

You can create audiences based upon that.

You can create an audience, say the people who have gone to your homepage…you can create audiences to go to any website that you want, or any domain that you have on your website.

Using a real world example for us when you go to our website and you submit a quote.

Instead of going to a generic, thank you page, we have created a thank you page that’s got silly videos of goats, screaming.

It’s hilarious.

And so we say, “Hey, we’ve got your quote, while you’re waiting for us to respond back to you, enjoy this video. And it’s a stupid video.

All right. But that landing page has got pixel data on it.

So I know that when I pay money to Facebook and I’m driving people to that quote page, I’m telling Facebook that I only want to pay you when someone lands on this thank you page.

And then we’re only paying for people who actually fill out a quote, request.

Now it can get expensive, but Facebook knows because of that pixel ID, they’ve landed on that page and it triggers that page.

So when someone lands on this page, I’m going to pay and I’m not going to pay you to get the click.

I want to pay you to get the conversion, and I’m going to optimize you to convert that way.

And it may cost you $4 or $5 for quote, but if you can convert that and your average order size is a thousand dollars, you just paid $5 for a thousand dollar order and you just paid $5 for a customer for life if you take care of them.

So we use Facebook Pixels on our websites to build audiences, and to build that customer avatar, we want to take people who have visited our website in the last 180 days that fit our customer profile.

So then once you take that data, Facebook will build that on the back end of your website.

There’s a thing called business manager for Facebook and if you haven’t signed up for that, do. It’s free.

And if you have a Facebook page, you want to go into your Facebook business manager and make sure that you are creating an audience.

There’s the audience tab and in your business manager, click create audience.

And you want to create the audience based upon a Pixel.

It’s going to give you a pixel code.

It’s going to tell you how to put it in your website. So, and then walk you step by step. I mean, again, a caveman can do this.

Don’t be scared.

And if you don’t know how to do it, have someone on your team that does have someone who’s familiar websites that can…but it’s going to give you the code to put into your website that will then begin building that audience for you.

And now you have very relevant information.

When we go to Facebook marketing, we talk about a lot of people say, well, I boosted a post.

I always say that boosted a post is for engagement.

If you want people to engage with that post, then boosted all day long, but understand that you’re not getting any conversion on that.

For every $10 or $20 that you give Facebook, you’re going to get $0 million back. And if you’re okay with that, that’s what boosting is for.

But the other thing that you want to do is you want to actually convert.

You want to build campaigns to convert, and that’s where that Facebook Pixel comes in.

Boosting does nothing for you.

Facebook ads. A relevant ad is targeted to people that have visited your website via Facebook. Pixel is important.

So conversion…and Facebook ad is for conversion boosting a post is for engagement.

And that conversion happens with that Facebook Pixel. So, that’s one of the things that you gotta do. You put the code in your website, that’s your Pixel.

And then your business manager will begin creating that audience for you based upon people who visited that.

And then you can say, “I want to target everyone who clicked on the front end of our website”.

Let me backtrack a little bit. I want to contact everyone. I’m going to reach everyone who clicked get a quote, but didn’t finish and hit that “Thank You” page.

Right? So we got that “Thank You” page. So we can even target people who started the quote, but never finished a quote.

And now you’re able to come back and we’ve all done it. We’ve all been to websites and it’ll say, “Oh, you forgot something in your cart.”

Or, you know, you visit one webpage and then you’ve got four or five competitors following you around.

That’s similar to that. That’s all from that Facebook Data Pixel.

And so we use a lot of retargeting campaigns of people who started quotes, but never finished them. And in the last 30 days, and we’ll see those quotes come through.

So that’s what a Facebook pixel is. It’s gathering information about people who visit your website so you can then market to them on a very high octane, highly targeted list, and maximize your dollars.

In order to reach them more effectively, as opposed to throw some money at Facebook with no idea who your avatar is. And that’s okay to start out.

If sometimes we want to go to the United States of people who are 18 to 65 on Facebook to drive traffic to our website, to begin building that pixel data. To know that, how to target them better down the road.  And that’s okay.

Spend $5 a day to build that data. But always remember this only spend money on Facebook marketing that you’re willing to lose because it’s going to take some time to get right.

But once you’ve got it right for every day, if you could give Facebook a dollar and they give you back to you, don’t have to worry about money ever again, your business will always grow and thrive.

Just understand that you’re going to lose that in the beginning to try to build that audience and understand who you are and build that Facebook data pixel. And it’s important too, to get that hammered out.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:51:18]

So it’s like going to a casino and learning how to play blackjack. If you’ve never gambled before.

Shelby Craig: [00:51:24]

Yes.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:51:25]

Understand the rules of the game. Otherwise. You’re just chucking the money away.

Shelby Craig: [00:51:30]

Yeah. I mean, a lot of times we throw money out.

I’ll tell people if you want to boost the posts, go ahead and just take that $20 and take twenty $1 bills and throw it out the window of your building and see if people can catch it.

You’ll actually get more excitement out of that, then you will boost in the post, because that’s what we’re doing is kind of, you know, wasting that money.

You’ve got to learn the rules. You gotta.  And it’s always changing. And I think that’s what scares people.

Marshall is it’s always changing.

Facebook’s always changing stuff and you’ve gotta be on top of your game and you gotta read and you gotta learn. And that’s okay.

Read and learn and educate yourself.

But if you never try, you’ll never win. You’ve got to try a little bit. First step is building that pixel follow the steps on and installing that on your website.

And there’s so much things that can happen because of that. You can build campaigns based upon the people who have visited your website and people that look like them.

You can build retargeting campaigns, people who’ve gone to your website, but didn’t complete a certain task. And then you can also build on people who look like them.

That’s called lookalike audiences.

For “Here for Good…I’ll use this example. We did the “Here for Good” campaign and we built Facebook data pixel upon that. And what we did was everyone who came into the funnel into the very front page of “Here for Good” started building Facebook data. And then what we did is we had, we had shot a video, the explain the entire program.

So anyone who entered into the gate, but didn’t exit properly what’s that was make a purchase would see a video explaining what we were doing.

We were spending $20 a day. So I assumed that a t-shirt cost 20 bucks. And I thought, well, if we spend $20 a day, it’s the cost of a t-shirt.

I’m willing to give up a cost of a tee shirt in order to reach more people. For every $20 we were spending our cost per lead came down to $1.40 per lead that we’re coming back to our website to be able to make a purchase.

So if I pull up our data, if I was able to share our screen, and you could see through your radio right now, or your headphones on what that looks like…we told Facebook, anyone who entered our website, but does not make a purchase on www.hereforgoodtn.com we want to retarget.

And we want to only give you money once we actually get a purchase. And so our cost was minimal. And so we were spending less than $2 in order to get a $20 purchase. And then once they made that purchase, we had another retargeting campaign to just always kept them in the loop of what we were doing as far as like how much we had raised and how they were the hero of the brand that they chose to support.

So all that started with that pixel.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:54:46]

That’s fantastic.

All right. Well, great. Well, Hey, thanks Shelby for your time today.

It was incredible learning about how to reposition search for the website and dig in, and I can’t wait to start using actually some of these tips for the, all those stuff that I do.

So, thanks.

Shelby Craig: [00:55:06]

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:55:08]

Yeah. So if a listener wants to know more about what you do or how you can deliver success to them. What is the best way that they can contact you?

Shelby Craig: [00:55:19]

Yeah.  So we have a marketing agency as well, marketingrocket.net If you want clarity and help in doing that, we love to help you out with that.

Our t-shirt company is called rocketshirts.net.  If you want to be followed around the internet, you can visit our website, as long as you fit our profile.

So if you don’t fit our profile, we may not follow you around. And you can always follow me on social media. Instagram, Twitter, I’m Shelby_Craig, and we’d love to connect with you guys if we can.

So if I can help you out in any way, I probably give more information away than I, than I get paid for.

And that’s okay. Because if you win, we win, and this industry wins altogether.

Marshall Atkinson: [00:55:55]

Awesome. Hey, thanks Shelby. Appreciate you.

Shelby Craig: [00:55:57]

Hey, thanks, Marshall. All right. Thanks.

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