The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you byEsther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves.
And we're back. You certainly weren't expecting 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?
Sure. So, thank you ever so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. So, yes, I run AJS Digital Group, which is E-commerceDigital Marketing growth company. So we help e-commerce companies scale for six or seven figures.
That sounds easy.
Well, I'm a magician, I do have the cape.
Okay, that's easy then.
Well there is work.
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.
So you have to get the 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 a couple of 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 sell 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.
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?
Right, yes. I love that you've made a Spanish joke. That's very clever. To get to six figures you need a 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 inplace. So a lot of that is about getting the full thought in before you actually start. So you have things like SOPs. You have what's that?
Sorry?
We have SOPs - standard operating procedures.
See, can't assume people know what they mean. Standard operating procedures.
Basically, if you have a big thick wod 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 then can scale pretty quickly.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
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 most of the time.
So you're not doing it for them, you're actually enabling them to learn how to do it themselves.
So I do a bit of both. So I have clients that I coach thatI'm teaching their whole team how to scale and how to market better. And then, yes, some of them will say, right can we do X? And then they'll outsource that to me or pass it on to a partner business or I'll do it myself so, yeah, there's a little bit.
Of both so we can't just rock up to you and go, right, I want an e-commerce website, want it launched next week, let's go, without having all this stuff pre organised and prearranged in the background?
No, but I think that's like if you start a marketing agency and have a twelve month target of two mil turnover you wouldn't be able to doit overnight. You have to have some sort of insight and some sort of knowledge of how to get there.
And it's like we always talk about you need to know who your customers are and you 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?
Right.
Let's just stick with the hardware shop.
Sure. 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 everything 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, youcan 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 do I maintain it properly so it lasts for longer? What draw? Which should I use? What drill bits shouldn't Iuse? 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 beingvery 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, etcetera. You can just take out snippets for social, right? And so that then becomes a way to market yourself as a business without being buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff and so then you're actually inspiring people to buy rather than telling people to buy, which is much more powerful.
So I just wanted to clarify e-commerce is actually quite aharsh area to work in, isn't it? Because there's no personality normally there's no community behind e-commerce per se. Obviously we're doing "fourtimesing" your e-commerce 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.
Right. I think it comes back to how you're serving the customer, right? And so I think you can do things in a very friendly way intohow you're serving the customer. A client that I have at the moment is a gift business, right, so we're talking a lot about that brand story in sort of howit actually communicates to customers and it's then about repositioning them tosay, well, actually, somebody's not going to buy a balloon for their 21st birthday, right, just because they want a balloon, right? It's the emotion thatcreates and so how can we describe that emotion that it creates in a way thatis captivating in a way that draws people in? Because then you're making saleson 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 thingis the discovery, right? The selfish element of it is when you discover that gift, you think, "Oh perfect gift for Sarah", or whoever, right, justusing my sister's name, I'm sure she'll listen to it. So that to me, is just a simpactful as having a story to tell. And so, yeah, I do think it's about tryingto 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 trying to really educate that person how to use it. I thinkthe greatest example of this is John Lewis. I think when you go through JohnLewis's website, for example, there's a really great personality behind everyitem 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 you say, it's how you make people feel.
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 drill bit? Because they're maybe trying to put up a bookshelf. Why they pick up a bookshelf? To have nice books or nice pictures on their wall.
Get to kid's stuff off the floor.
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 bamboozling people with clever marketing speak.
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.
Indeed.
And so part of that point would be features tell, benefits sell. It sounds very much like, Esther, that e-commerce, even though it can be a bit impersonable, can still be used very much the same way as social posting.
Absolutely.
But there's actually slightly more SEO behind it.
Indeed. But I think, and this is the critical point, is I don't think people understand. I think a lot of people shove an e-commerce 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 toresonate with that customer.
Yeah, we definitely need to always think about the UI, theUX, who is your end user? Who is the person that's going to be scrollingthrough the site? It's been so many years since "mobile friendly"became a thing. There are still so many sites that aren't mobile friendly. Itjust turns me off completely.
It's like, right.
The SSL cert as well, that people still aren't securing their sites either.
Especially if there's a payment platform connected.
Exactly.
You're losing out on a trick there. Yeah.
Yeah, indeed. And the thing for me, what I find frustrating is most hosting companies now give you a basic SSL for free.
There's no excuse.
There's no excuse. And if your hosting company wants to charge you for it, then I would either change my hosting provider or literally just email them to death to give me one for free. And that has worked.
Has it worked? You've heard it here first. Email them to death.
Email them 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 reputable online and they're not doing that, they have a fundamental flaw in their business model.
Another thing, though, getting back to the customer journey and scrolling through a website, if you're able to get in with the SSL certificate, some people 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.
Right.
How many drill bits should be on the same page?
Within like 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 drill down. That's terrible, I know Melanie is rolling her eyes at me.Absolutely. You might want to drill down and actually have right, so we have ten different 4 inch 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? And then you have another page that has half inch drill bits or whatever, right? This is how limited my knowledge of drill bits is.
I should've chosen a different topic.
Yeah, but then, like, product pages should just have the one product on, because you then make it difficult for people to understand if you have three or four different options, unless they're colour options. So you have different colours, obviously, 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 want to have different pages because it then helps the user make a quicker decision, then if they're going to make a decision they're more likely to buy, because they're looking for a solution in the quickest time possible. So they're looking for you to solve that problem and why are they on your site, and not on something like Etsy, for example, or Ebay. And it can you solve that problema can you solve that problem quickly. Just KISS is probably the best acronym.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Yeah. Or Keep it Simple Silly, as my mother would say.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry Mummy.
One debate I've had with people over the past is it seemsobvious for drill bits, balloons and jewellery to go onto e-commerce websites,but these days, certainly over here in Ireland, we've got a trading onlinevoucher that's available to people here. So it's encouraging people to putservices and not just products onto online e-commerce websites. So e-commercecan be used for both services and products, but how many is it worth doing anactual e-commerce website? Or is it the likes of and I know I'm swearing here,Esther, WordPress, and then doing the plugin... They're both rolling their eyesat me now. When is it worth going over to a proper full-time legit e-commercewebsite?
Yes, sure.
It depends.
What matters is, say you're running like a service businessthat you've productised, so you're selling blocks of time. You're sellingblocks of outcomes.
Right, okay. Blocks of time, blocks of outcomes.
Then running something like WordPress with WooCommerce, it'sprobably going to be the simplest, most elegant solution for you, because youmay have three or four products, whereas WooCommerce and WordPress isn't reallydesigned for the specificity that, say, Shopify is. So you can't do userjourneys, you can't do suggested products in a way that you can manipulate. Sowhen I had an e-commerce jewellery store, this was five, six years ago, I wentfrom WooCommerce to Magento and spent three weeks, seven days a week, to teachmyself how to do Magento. True story. It's really hard, but Magento, you canliterally go to the back of Magento and click what you want, like relatedproducts at the bottom, and that obviously helps and guide the user to spendmore money.
Oh, so that's what you see in Amazon is it Amazon. Yeah. Sothat's Magento, is it? Or things like Amazon.
Things like that. So Amazon have pioneered that and they'vegot their own mainframe, their own AI that's running that. But yeah, you canincrease or average all the value by doing things like, say, watch, then why webuy like a feels watch, why we don't buy something some female jewellery withthat. Or you're buying a man's watch. Why we not buy like a watch winder or awatch box or one of those pop out trays, those kind of things. So it makessense that you are directing the user in that kind of way. I would say ifyou've got more than probably like ten or 20 products and you probably want tomove to something like Shopify or Magento or Big Cart where you've actually gotbig Commerce, where you've actually got the flexibility to do lots of thesecrazy things that just WordPress isn't designed to do. But under ten, WordPresswill probably be adequate for your needs.
Cool.
I gave an answer without saying it depends.
But it does because you said yourself if you've only gotlike four or five products, it wouldn't make sense to use Magento or thingslike that because it would be like driving a Ferrari to the school, pick upyour kids when you only live around the corner. Yeah, so it does. It depends.It always depends. The answer to every marketing question.
Yeah, I think especially marketers and maybe we can work onthis for a little bit when marketers say "it depends", but they can'tthen clarify why that really irritates me, especially as like a customer.
Oh, yes.
I try not to say it depends without being able to clarifywhy we did.
We clarified it there. We clarified it depends on the size.
So going back to how you can actually make this growth,because what I admire about your business mostly is the fact that you canactually elevate somebody using tactics. Okay. And everything starts, as yousay, with the customer and brand values and personas and messaging and all thatsort of stuff. But where the money is made is after all that hard work andresearch, and that's when you create the campaigns and the tactics and theproof points and the touch points, correct?
Yes, absolutely.
How would you explain to our listeners, bearing in mind thatthey're fairly well traversed across America, UK, and Ireland. So how would youhelp people prioritise what they need to do in order to go from their existingbusiness, which we assume has been in business for over a couple of years, andyou want to really help them scale up, AJ.
Right. So, I'm currently adopting a framework that I'mcoining POC. Right. So it's persona, outcome and then cash.
Okay.
This is a world exclusive because I've never talked that ona podcast before.
You heard it here first.
You heard it first. So what I mean by persona is what problemyou're solving. So that could be pain, it could be whatever. Prospects. Whatoutcome you want to take on the website? So you want them to buy a product, youwant them to go to booking form, do you want them to take quiz, whatever,right? So how are you going to get that first stage? And then obviously, cashis how are you going to extract money from them. And so, for me, a lot ofpeople do, they may have like the front ends, they may have a way to attractpeople onto the website. So they're running a paid ad, they're doing thingslike podcasts, they're doing things like SEO, lead magnets. Exactly. But theyhave a really, really crap user journey to get them to that outcome they wantpeople to take. So they're doing something like they're just throwing lots ofcontent out, or they just have loads of products and they're not thinking aboutwhat people actually want to buy. And so then they're not funnelling people tothe outcome that they want them to. A bit like herding sheep. Which is probablythe best analogy I can use, right? Because they're doing such a crap job thatthey don't actually have a good conversion rate. And then but beyond getting tothe outcome, then they're not doing anything in between the outcome whenthey're getting the cash. So you could do stuff, so you could do things likeyour e-commerce selling furniture, right? You could do, hey, sign up and get20% off after your first purchase, right? Whether or not they spend that 20% isby the by. They probably won't. But once you have the email address, the worstthing you do is you send them right, we'll add them 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 sofa from me and distil it into, say, threeor four emails before you even drop them into the weekly email sequence.Because then you've actually started to talk to them, rather than at them, andthen getting cash from them is going to be far easier, right? And then once yougot cash, then it's about them saying couple of weeks after they bought a sofaor they bought a chair, then saying, what do you think? How can we improve?Aftercare. And so I think a lot of businesses do this very poorly whetherthey're trying to sell marketing, when they're trying to sell consultingservices, where they're trying to sell sofas, they don't think about how toactually move the user through to the point where they feel comfortable enoughto give them the cash. Excuse my French but they want to s*** them before they'vedated them. You might have to delete that later.
Oh, Lord. There's always one, isn't there?
There is. But a lot of businesses want to get to that blinddate with a ring before they've even said hello, they say, Will you marry me?And a lot of businesses are like that and they don't consider actually the bestthing to do is send them a bunch of flowers or box of chocolates. And to say,right, do you trust me like, an inch. Do you trust me like a foot, etcetera?
Well yes and no? Because I think it really depends becauseyour POC again, i'm qualifying it because people only give you cash if they'rein the right mindset to buy.
Yeah, exactly.
And it doesn't matter how many times you tell people whatkind of problem you solve and what outcome they're going to get out of it ifthey're not in the right place to buy, because they could be hearing aboutyours, reading about you as they're on the way out to pick up Billy fromschool, and then you're just completely forgotten after hearing the schoolday's drama. So how do you get over that outcome, AJ. How do you get people togo back through that cycle again?
So I wouldn't necessarily say that people have forgottenabout you. I think it's just another touch point, isn't it?
It is another touch point, yes.
And I think, again, it is about going through more touchpoints than you might think are necessary to be able to build thatrelationship. So I think it depends on situationals. It's been like we getdrunk and somebody tells you their deepest secret. You then forget until you'redrunk again, right?
It's weird how you only remember when you're drunk next.
Exactly.
It's weird, isn't it?
It is. It's very weird. Especially because I'm tea total,and I've been tea total for like forever.
Don't tell him your secrets.
Absolutely, it's all coming out now isn't it.
With creating more touch points and maybe more lead magnetsand creating other areas throughout your funnel. And that's how you encouragepeople to build the scale up in their business basically, yeah. So do you havea lead magnet that we can share?
I do indeed. So I have a 30 points content that people canget on the website and I'll send you a link after. Okay, great.
That link will be at the bottom, guys. So when you listen tothe podcast, go into the show notes and get the link. Well, AJ, it's beenwonderful. We'll wrap it up now because we normally only go for 20 minutes, butit's been so interesting.
I could talk to you guys all day, It'd be great.
I know we are.
I don't know if people would like to listen but it'd begreat.
But it has been great having you on, AJ. And if anybody is interested in 4 x-ing your e-commerce do, get in touch with AJ on the link andwe'll be back next week with more Monday Morning Marketing. Until then, bye bye
Bye guys.