Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of Stomp Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves.
Melanie
And we're back. You certainly weren't expected to hear my voice this time, were you? So myself and Esther are here today to welcome AJ, and he is the founder of AJS Digital Group, to be specific. And AJ. Tell me about AJS digital Group. What exactly is it and what does it do?
AJ
Sure. So, thank you ever so homie. I'm so excited to be here. So, yes, I run AJS Group, which is E-commerce Digital Marketing proof company. So we help e-commerce companies scale for six or seven figures.
Esther
That sounds easy.
AJ
Well, I'm a magician, I do have the cape.
Esther
Okay, that's easy then.
AJ
Work.
Esther
So how long would it take a company to scale to six or seven figures? Let's say we're starting a website today. We're starting to sell online today.
AJ
So you have to fundamentals, right? So it really depends on what your product mix is, what the demand is in the market, and how quickly you can gather and gain attention. So say you have some retail stores and you're running something like, say, hardware, right? So you're selling power tools, you're selling drill bits, you're selling nails, right? You probably could shelf six, maybe seven figures within say, twelve to 18 months, maybe two years. But you have to have all the fundamentals in place. You'd have to have all distribution, all the supply lines all ready to go for you to be able to have that, to be able to cope with the demand. So, yeah, so it's not just one element, it's a couple of different elements you have to have in place.
Melanie
So when you're talking about elements, are you suggesting how people can add in virtual assistants, outsourcing, time management? Is it the whole enchilada?
AJ
Right? Yes. I love that you've made a slash joke. That's very clever. To get your team, you need to have suppliers that can cope with that demand. You need to have infrastructure into warehousing and a CRM system that can handle that and have all the processes in place. So a lot of that is about getting the full thought in before you actually start. So you have things like SRPs. You have what's that?
Melanie
Sorry?
AJ
We have SRPs and standard operating procedures.
Melanie
See, I'm assuming people know what they mean. Standard operating procedures.
AJ
Basically, if you have a big thick ward of checklist that you can give to people who you can divvy up into different job specs, ie. SOPs just to be clear, right, you don't have to scale pretty quickly.
Melanie
Yeah.
AJ
And I often find that people and businesses, they don't have any marketing kind of style guide, they don't have any customer intelligence, they don't have any kind of processes, and they don't have any ability to scale, generally can't scale because it's just a dream at that point.
Melanie
Yeah.
AJ
And so a lot of times I go to these businesses and I say, this is the robot. How we're going to scale? And basically, I'm a checklist. I'm a glorified checklist writer.
Melanie
So you're not doing it for them, you're actually enabling them to learn how to do it themselves.
AJ
So I do a bit of both. So I have clients that I coach that I'm teaching there to help team healthier scale and how to market better. And then, yes, some of them will say, Why can we do X? And then they'll outsource that to me or partner business or I'll do it myself so, yeah, there's a little bit.
Esther
Of both so we can't just rock up to you and go, right, I want an ecommerce website, want it launched next week, let's go without having all this stuff pre organised and prearranged in the background?
AJ
No, but I think that's like if you start a marketing agency and have a twelve month target of two mil turnover you told me overnight. You have to have some sort of insight and some sort of knowledge of how to get there.
Esther
And it's like we always talk about you need to know who your customers absolutely need to your background and your homework and see and where would you recommend people would promote their site once they have it up and running?
AJ
Right.
Esther
Let'S just stick with the hardware shop sure.
AJ
So I'm a massive fan of doing lots of content so that's my background so I would say have really good strong content plans so everybody that you'll sell solves a problem and so how can you create content around what problem that item solves? So, say selling drills for example, you can create 20 pieces of content about a drill because you can do right, what how use a drill for? How can it help me? How did it maintain it properly so it lasts for longer? What draw? Which should I use? What drawers shouldn't I use? Those kind of pieces of content. And so you can create a lot of value that then leave people to purchase items without being kind of in your face being very salesy. And so you can do that, and by doing lots of that kind of content, you can then repurpose it as YouTube videos or TikTok videos or social posts, et cetera. You can just pay out snippets for social, right? And so that then becomes a way to market yourself as a business without being by myself, by myself, by myself and so then you're actually inspiring people to buy rather than telling people to buy, which is much more powerful so.
Melanie
I just wanted to clarify ecommerce is actually quite a harsh area to work in, isn't it? Because there's no personality normally there's no community behind ecommerce per se obviously we're doing four times in your ecommerce here, how can we exactly make it more friendly, more relatable when we're talking about e commerce and promoting ourselves, because I know we need to be salesy, but there is a time for that. You can't be salesy all the time, surely.
AJ
Right. I think it comes back to how you're sending the customer, right? And so I think you can do things in a very friendly way into how you're sending the customer. I can't have the money in the gift business, right, so we're talking a lot about that brand story into how actually communicate to customers and it's then about repositioning them to say, well, actually, somebody's not going to buy a balloon for their 21st birthday, right, just because they want balloon. Right. It's the emotion that creates and so how can we describe that emotion that it creates in a way that is captivating in a way that draws people in? Because then you're making sales on the back of being relatable. And so there's lots of things we can do and it comes up to just basic storytelling. And if you think about gifts, the most exciting thing about giving a gift is the actual giving. And the second thing is the discovery, right? The selfish element of it is when you discover that gift, you think, for Sarah, whoever, right, I took a message to it. So that to me, is just as impactful as having a story to tell.
AJ
And so, yeah, I do think it's about trying to train the emotions and try and be more personable. But also I think people have got away from just listing out features as a product description to trying to tell a story and try to really educate that person how to use it. I think the greatest example of this is John Lewis. I think when you go through John Lewis website, for example, there's a really great personality behind every item that they try to sell and they try to describe why you might want to buy it or who you might want to give it to, why you want to use it or why it's different. I think that really sells it in a way that isn't it's not what.
Melanie
You say, it's how you make people feel.
AJ
Absolutely, yeah. The nail on the head of that one, that's the hardware example. I really think it's that. But I also think it is about trying to sell the outcome and not the features, because why would somebody buy a half inch straw bit? Because they maybe pick up a bookshelf. Why they pick up a bookshelf? To have nice books or nice pitches on their wall.
Melanie
Get to keep stuff off the floor.
AJ
Well, yeah, of course. That to me is kind of you're trying to use storytelling to sell items in a way that connects with the outcome or the pain that you're helping solve, rather than busy people with clever marketing speech.
Melanie
Oh, you're so right. The amount of time I keep on seeing people talking about their product or their service and totally not mentioning the pain point they're solving, and it's become more and more common. Storytelling is important, but there has to be a point to it.
AJ
Indeed.
Melanie
And so part of that point would be features tell, benefits sell. Yeah, it sounds very much like, Esther, that Ecommerce, even though it can be a bit impersonable, can still be used very much the same way as social posting.
AJ
Absolutely.
Melanie
But there's actually slightly more SEO behind it.
AJ
Is people I don't think people understand. I think a lot of people shove the ecommerce site over the weekend and think, we're going to make our millions here, and they don't think about either customer journey or customer targeting or how it resonates with that customer.
Melanie
Yeah.
Esther
We definitely need to always think about the UI, the UX, who is your end user? Who is the person that's going to be scrolling through the site? It's been so many years since mobilefriendly became a thing. There are still so many sites that aren't mobile friendly. It just turns me off completely.
AJ
It's like, right.
Melanie
The SSL Sir as well, that people still aren't securing their sites either.
Esther
Especially if there's a payment platform connected.
Melanie
Exactly.
Esther
You're using it in a trick there. Yeah.
AJ
Yeah, indeed. And the thing for me, what I found fitting is most hosting companies now give you a basic SSL for free.
Esther
There's no excuse.
AJ
There's no excuse. And if your company wants to charge you for it, then I would either change my coaching provider or I literally just email them to death to give me one for free.
Melanie
You've heard it here first. Email them to death.
AJ
Email to death, indeed. Because they want to be reputable in the marketplace. Why do they not offer a basic SSL for free? Right. I can understand whether they're charging and they're doing it for the feature that the additional features are paying for, but they're trying to promote being rushable online and they're not doing that. They have a financial flow in their business model.
Esther
Another thing, though, like getting back to the customer journey and scrolling through a website, if you're able to get in with the SSL certificate, then.
Melanie
Some people.
Esther
Just feel that they have to put every product on the one page. So how many, in your opinion, how many products per page make for a good user experience? And don't say it depends, because that's a really marketing answer. Give us a straight answer here.
AJ
Right.
Esther
How many drill bits should be drilled.
AJ
Within the drill bits? You may want to put twelve or 24 on a page and then have multiple pages, but then you also might want to sit and publish down. I know Belly is rolling her eyes at me. Absolutely. You might want to drill down and actually have right, so we have ten different orange drill bits that are selling. Can we have that on page because then that helps us talk about the type of hole you can drill. Sell the outcome, right, yeah. And then you have another page that has half inch drawbits or whatever. Right. This is how limited balloons.
Esther
Page.
AJ
Yeah, but then, like, product pages should just have the one product on, because you make it difficult for people to understand if you have three or four different options, unless they colour options. So you have different colours, obviously. Right. Put them on one page, make it easier for the customer to select. But if you've got different variations of the same products, different, like Wording, like balloons, for example, 21, 50, whatever, you may not have different pages because it then helps the user make a quicker decision, then they're going to make a decision they're more like to buy, all right? Because they're looking for a solution in the quickest time possible. Right. So they're looking for you to solve that problem and why they're on your site, on something like Etsy, for example, or Ebay. And it came to that problem quickly. Just Kiss is probably the best acronym.
Melanie
Keep it simple. Stupid.
AJ
Yeah. Or keep it Simple Silly, as my one will say.
Melanie
Oh, sorry.
Esther
Mommy.
Melanie
One tip bait I've had with people over the past is it seems obvious for drill bits, balloons and jewellery to go onto ecommerce websites, but these days, certainly over here in Ireland, we've got a trading online voucher that's available to people here. So it's encouraging people to put services and not just products onto online ecommerce websites. So ecommerce can be used for both services and products, but how many? Is it worth doing an actual ecommerce website? Or is it the likes of and I know I'm swearing here, Esther WordPress, and then doing the plugin the most rolling their eyes are meaner. When is it worth going over to a proper fulltime legit ecommerce website?
AJ
Yes, sure.
Esther
It depends.
AJ
What matters is, say you're running like a service business that you've promptized, so you're selling blocks of time. We're selling blocks of outcomes.
Melanie
Right, okay. Blocks of time, blocks of outcomes.
AJ
Right. Then wearing something like WordPress with WooCommerce, it's probably going to be the simplest, most elegant solution for you, because you may have three or four products, whereas WooCommerce and WordPress isn't really designed for the specificity that, say, shopify is.
Esther
Right?
AJ
So you can't do user journeys, you can't do suggested products in a way that you can manipulate. So when I had an ecommerce jewellery store, this was five, six years ago, I went from WooCommerce to Magento and spent three weeks, seven days a week, to teach us how to do magento. True story. It's really hard, but magenta, you can literally get to the back of magenta and click what you want. Products like related products at the bottom, and that obviously helps and guide the user to spend more money.
Melanie
Oh, so that's what you see in Amazon is it Amazon. Yeah. So that's magento, is it? Or things like Amazon.
AJ
Things like that. So Amazon have pioneered that and they've got their own for their own AI that's running. That right. But yeah, you can increase average all the value by doing things like, say, watch, then why we buy like a feels watch, why we don't buy something or dory with that. Or you're buying a man's watch. Why we not buy like a watch winder or a watch box or one of those pop out trays. Right. Those kind of things. So it makes sense that you are directing the user in that kind of way. I would say if you've got more than probably like ten or 20 products and you probably want to move to something like shopify or magento or big cart where you've actually got big commas, where you've actually got the flexibility to do lots of these crazy things that just WordPress isn't designed to do. But at the end of ten, WordPress will probably be adequate for your needs.
Melanie
Cool.
AJ
I gave an option.
Melanie
It depends.
Esther
But it does because you said yourself if you've only got like four or five products, it wouldn't make sense to use magento or things like that because it would be like driving a Ferrari to the school, pick up your kids when you only live around the corner. Yeah, so it does. It depends. It always depends. The answer to every marketing question.
AJ
Yeah, especially marketers. And maybe we can rifle this for a little bit when marketers depends, but they can't then clarify why that really irrespects me, especially as like a customer.
Esther
Oh, yes.
AJ
I try not to say it depends without being able to clarify why we did.
Esther
We clarified it there. We clarified it depends on the size.
Melanie
So going back to how you can actually make this growth, because what I admire about your business mostly is the fact that you can actually elevate somebody using tactics. Okay. And everything starts, as you say, with the customer and brand values and personas and messaging and all that sort of stuff. But where the money is made is after all that hard work and research, and that's when you create the campaigns and the tactics and the proof points and the touch points, correct?
AJ
Yes, absolutely.
Melanie
How would you explain to our listeners, bearing in mind that they're fairly well traversed across America, us and US. And Ireland? I know my geography.
AJ
Keep on the map.
Melanie
So how would you help people prioritise what they need to do in order to go from their existing business, which we assume has been in business for over a couple of years, and you want to really help them scale up agents.
AJ
Right. So I'm currently adopting a framework that I'm coining POC. Right. So it's persona, outcome and then cash.
Melanie
Okay.
AJ
This is well, exclusive because I've never talked that to the podcast before.
Esther
You heard it here.
AJ
First you hear it first. Right. So by persona is what problem you're solving. So that could be pain, it could be whatever. Right. Prospects. What can you want to take on the website? So you want them to buy a product, you want them to go to booking form, jolting them to quiz, whatever, right? So how are you going to get that first stage? And then obviously, cash is paying an extract money from them.
Melanie
Extract.
AJ
Right. And so, for me, a lot of people do, they may have like the front ends, they may have a way to track people onto the website. So they're running a paid ad, they're doing things like podcasts, they're doing things like SEO leaders. Exactly. But they have a really, really crap user journey to get them to that outcome they want people to take. So they're doing something like they're just throwing content out, or they just have loads of products and they're not thinking about what people actually want to buy. And so then they're not selling people to the outcome that they want them to. A bit like hurting sheep. Right. Which is probably the best that's really good analogy I can use, right? Because they have such a crap job that they don't actually have a good conversion rate. And then but beyond getting to the outcome, then they're not doing anything in between the outcome when they're getting the cash. So you could do stuff, so you could do things like your ecommerce selling furniture, right? You could do, hey, sign up and get 20% off after your first purchase, right? Whether or not they spend that 20% is by the buyer.
AJ
They probably won't. But once you have the email address, the worst thing you do is you send them right down to our weekly newsletter. Why would they trust you when the best thing you can do is you can say, right, why they don't come to me and buy a Suffer from me and distil it into, say, three or four emails before you even drop them into the weekly email sequence. Because then you actually start to talk to them, run at them, and then getting cash from them is far easier, right? And then once you got cash, then it's about them saying couple of weeks after they bought a sofa or they bought a chair, then saying, what do you think? How can we improve anyway? And so I think a lot of businesses do this very rapidly. When they're trying to sell marketing, when they're trying to sell consulting services, where they're trying to sell sofas, they don't think about how to actually move the user through to the point where they feel comfortable enough to give them the cash. She is my friend. They want to shag them while they've dated them. You might have to treat that later.
Melanie
Oh, Lord. There's always one, isn't there?
AJ
There is no worse. But a lot of businesses want to get to that blind date with a ring before they even said hello, they say, Will you marry me? And a lot of businesses are like that and they don't consider actually the best thing to do is flourish. Flowers or box chocolates. And to say, right, do you trust me? Like, an inch. Do you trust me?
Melanie
Like, et cetera, yes or no? Because I think it really depends because your pock again, shut up. I'm qualifying it because people only give you cash if they're in the right mindset to buy.
AJ
Yeah, exactly.
Melanie
And it doesn't matter how many times you tell people what kind of problem you solve and what outcome they're going to get out of it if they're not in the right place to buy, because they could be hearing about yours, reading about you as they're on the way out to pick up Billy from school, and then you're just completely forgotten after hearing the school days drama. So how do you get over that outcome, AJ. How do you get people to go back through that cycle again?
AJ
So I wouldn't necessarily say that people have forgotten about you. I think it's just another touch point, isn't it?
Melanie
It is another touch point, yes.
AJ
And I think, again, it is about going through more touch points than you might think are necessary to be able to build that relationship. So I think it depends on situationals. It's been like we get drunk and somebody tells you they're deeper secret. You never forget being drunk again. Right?
Melanie
How you only remember when you're drunk next.
AJ
Exactly.
Melanie
It's weird, isn't it?
AJ
It is. It's very weird. Especially if some sea turtle, that means sea turtle for like forever.
Esther
Tell them your secrets.
AJ
Absolutely.
Melanie
With crayon more touch points and maybe more league magnets and creating other areas throughout your funnel. And that's how you encourage people to build the scale up in their business.
AJ
Basically, yeah.
Melanie
Magnet that we can share.
AJ
I do indeed. So I have a 30 points console that people can get on the website and I'll send you a link after. Okay, great.
Esther
That link will be at the bottom, guys. So when you listen to the podcast, go into the show notes and get the link. Hey, Jake, that's been wonderful. We're wrapping up now because we normally only go for 20 minutes, but it's been so interesting.
AJ
It'd be great.
Esther
I know we are.
AJ
It'd be great.
Esther
But it has been great having you on, AJ. And if anybody is interested in forexing your ecommerce do, get in touch with AJ on the link and we'll be back next week with more Monday morning marketing. Until then, bye.
Melanie
Bye. Bye, guys. Bye. See, for a long time you've accused me of doing the waving and now I was encouraging you to waving.
Esther
I was encouraging you two to say goodbye. It's like, am I the only one still here?
Melanie
Now you're waiting as well. Seriously, guys.