Aaron Agius and Gian Clancey: Episode 164

Transcript

[0:00:29] CH: Author hour is about answering one question: How can you get the best ideas from great books without spending so much time reading? Every week, we take you behind the scenes with a new author, about the most important points in their book. So if you love to learn while you're on the go, you’re in the right place. All of our book summaries are 100% free and we do more than a hundred episodes every year. So please subscribe to and review Author Hour on iTunes. Today’s episode is with Aaron Agius and Gian Clancey, the coauthors of Faster, Smarter, Louder. In today’s online world, a brand’s success lies in combining tech savvy and social smarts to draw their customers in and keep them coming back for more. But without a strong digital platform, our time and money are wasted. Our content sits there unnoticed and prospective clients disappear. But fortunately, Aaron and Gian are here to make your brand succeed. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to craft a digital marketing strategy and a brand that’s visible, in demand and built for the long haul. Or, in other words, louder. Now, here is our conversation with Aaron and Gian.

[0:02:15] GC: It was just over 10 years ago now. Aaron and I had both quit our jobs and taken somewhat of a sabbatical I guess, to Thailand in Copen Yang, where we decided to eat what we wanted to eat, sleep when we wanted to sleep and do nothing but pump ourselves with podcasts that we really wanted to listen to, teaching ourselves whatever skills we could and literally doing two hours of Muay Thai training a day and that was our life. Cruising around in the sun, swimming. We had this complete blank canvas I guess, in terms of what we were going to do next and it was pretty scary, it was right during the DFC and so like our families were all, you know, “You better come back, get a stable job” and we’d always have stable and very good jobs in the corporate world. But I think both of us were very tired of playing by someone else’s rules and having boundaries and hoops that we needed to jump through to get stuff done. Then we’re sitting on a beach and we both just looked at each other and went, “How can we make this last forever? How can we be in control of how we live?” That was really the driving force or the question that we wanted to answer for ourselves and we decided, I had a marketing background, I used to work for IBM and it was a very technical background and we figured that those two skills together would make a nice combination for a successful business. When everyone was you know, basically grouping on to their job security. We decided to start a business and yeah, I guess that’s basically where we had this idea initially that we wanted to be able to enable ourselves with the freedom to live how we wanted and then we wanted to build a business that enabled likeminded people to have the lifestyles that they wanted while contributing to the world and still you know, being a valuable part in the industry.

[0:04:21] CH: Wow. How long did it take you to get that business sort of up and running on its feet?

[0:04:28] AA: It took a while, because when we made this decision and we’re still on the island there, we knew we had those skillsets but it was more about working at it if it was real, you know? It was back in a time where everyone was saying they’re making money online but most people were making money, saying they’re making money online. It was one of those things where you just didn’t know how much was real or not and what we ended up doing was we moved back to Sydney and Gian, in between doing some different contract roles, was then doing all of the work for our agency or it wasn’t an agency at the time. But our business and I was spending all my time trying to figure it all out as well. I’d say it took around four months of nonstop working before we made 40 cents online. Which was a massive turning point for us. Because we’d spend everything we had, there was nothing left and there was surviving on loaves of bread and that sort of thing and yeah, it got to the point where we made that 40 cents online and that was a massive achievement because it just proved that everything was real, that you can make money, this wasn’t just made up. We also knew then what we know today in that the internet can be highly automated and is almost infinitely scalable and so that very next day we turned that 40 cents into $400 doing the same thing and everything changed from there.

[0:05:57] CH: Wow, what was that 40 cents and what was it when you scaled it up to 400?

[0:06:05] AA: In the beginning, all we knew was we wanted to make money online, because I’ve provided that geographical freedom and freedom from bosses and all that sort of stuff. We didn’t know what we were going to and that’s part of that whole first four months was like, “Well, what can we sell, how can we sell it, what short of channels are we looking at, are we going to learn SEO, are we going to learn PBC, social media?” “What are we going to do?” And we tried so many of it that they saw many different things and basically came down to saying, we had time on our hands and no money. We knew that doing SEO was something that we could learn and do ourselves so we kind of went down that path initially. In terms of monetization, it was we decided that we didn’t want to build websites, we didn’t want to create products and do all that sort of thing. We wanted fast as possible to make money so that was affiliate marketing at that time. That 40 cents was in driving traffic to hotel and accommodation, booking websites. Where we got paid per click.

[0:07:09] CH: Wow, okay. You scaled it up doing more affiliate marketing. Now, talking about your book, Faster, Smarter, Louder. Can you distill kind of the big idea in this because now you work with major brands and thought leaders and you help them with their online businesses in building their businesses. What is the big idea of this book?

[0:07:39] AA: The big idea is that it’s our way of saying, these are the shortcuts we take if we were starting again, these are the things that we learned that could make things more successful faster and getting rid of a lot of the stuff that people say, “You have to be doing this, you have to be doing that.” And so on, these are the things where if we started again, I’d cut out a lot of stuff and this is what I’d focus on. The big idea was just helping people like us be more successful faster and at the same time, it’s not only about those people, it’s about marketers and medium enterprise businesses, you know, CMO’s, that sort of thing. It’s that exact same sort of work and same output and work task that they need to doing order to grow the businesses that they’re working for as well. It works for both.

[0:08:31] CH: Yeah, let’s talk a bit about the problems that this book solves because like you kind of hinted to the online marketing world is, it’s not exactly clear always when you read something or you see somebody is doing a certain system or a certain type of business. If they’re profitable or if they’re really making the money they say they are. You two are legitimate experts but what are some of the problems that a lot of marketers run in to? Can we kind of dive in to that before we get into the solutions you two have presented in your book?

[0:09:15] AA: Yeah, I’ll let Gian jump in but just to preface that the thing that has become clear for us after 10 years is that so much of it is just lies, so much of it is manipulation, so much of it is just making stuff up and making themselves look better and I hated – not hated – we struggled initially trying to work on our own because there was no one to ask, we had no mentors at the time. Even now, I can imagine how confusing it would be for people starting up and even for seasoned CMO’s who are looking for the right sort of agencies, I can understand that too.

[0:09:51] GC: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that we talk about a lot in this book is the authenticity that any brand or person brings to the industry. I think in the saturated market that we’re in, you know, everyone’s like “The five best ways” or “The 10 things you’re doing wrong with your content marketing strategy.” I think what we need to remember as consumers of this content is that there’s a business behind that and the most valuable, smartest, authentic and validated industry experts that I know, they won’t make you pay for information. They will give you the information because they actually want to build others up and help each other out. The ones that are asking you for you know, $99 to get your report based on your website, there’s a thousand reports out there that you can get. They’re trying to make money for themselves and I think the difference between you know, just anyone that does online marketing and the ones that are truly leading the industry and are considered industry experts, are the ones that are giving away the file. They’re not holding on to their knowledge, they’re not holding on to their knowledge, they’re not holding on to information. By doing that –

[0:11:04] CH: I want to pause you there because some listeners might be thinking, “Well, what’s wrong with making money?” What would you say to that?

[0:11:12] GC: Everyone wants to make money, we all need it to survive so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that but what I’m saying is differentiating our industry. If someone’s asking you for you know, $100 for something that’s quite low level, that someone else is offering for free, the difference is that one, you may not be their target audience if you question that. Because the smaller businesses, they are willing to give out $100 to get that piece of information or whatnot and that’s within their budget but when we’re talking about you know, medium to large enterprises, they’re not going to be paying for that client with new information. The ones that will get through are the ones that are constantly, genuinely want to see their business do well. That’ snot something that can be short term, its’ got to be invested in and there needs to be this trust built between the customer and the seller I guess.

[0:12:08] CH: Right. Yeah, it really does seem to be this weird hell that is digital marketers selling anything under a thousand dollars, it’s kind of bizarre. I mean, you just can’t really scale anyway, a business with products like that, unless you’re selling to huge audiences that just buy it impulsively. It’s really tough.

[0:12:37] AA: Yeah, there is this section of the market that you know, startups and small businesses that are wanting the results of what big agencies can do for the biggest companies in the world but just don’t have the budget and you know, they’re willing to sort of part with that thinking, that’s now the magic pill that changes everything for them and it can be helpful, it can work in the right circumstances but there’s so many people just praying on that sort of market but makes it tough for people.

[0:13:09] CH: Super tough.

[0:13:09] GC: I think one of the important things that we talk about in our book is context about human behavior and why we do what we do and why it works online. You’ve got to remember that in this day and age, there’s a lot of fear in the world, there’s a lot of uncertainties and people are trying to control what they can control. When economies are bad and people’s jobs are on the line, they are looking for alternative solutions to support their families. The online industry is very easy to get in to and this is why some marketers will hone in on one part of the process and they’ll learn it inside out and then they’ll sell that part of the process for you know, $99 or $500. There are genuine people who want to learn these skills. There is a market for it but I think in context, you have to look at the volume of people that now identify themselves as actively working in the online industry versus 10 years ago and it is like infinitely scalable.

[0:14:11] CH: Yeah, let’s actually dive into the content in the book. You sort of lay out this journey for the reader who is wanting to build up a successful business. You start with building a better brand and then you get into things like boosting your traffic with the rules of engagement and you know, engaging your audience. Let’s begin with building a better brand, why start here?

[0:14:44] GC: First of all, we have this great idea, you want to start a business and you then develop your logo and get all the branding components. But a lot of the time, there are all the practical steps that people take when they’re building a brand and very much needed in order to establish themselves. One of the not so obvious things about building a brand is that you need to have this sense of validation and credibility behind you. In our book, we’re talking about building a better brand or saying, okay, when you’ve got all your practical branding, solutions in place that and you're happy with you know, your website, your design and everything like that, how are you going to tell people that you know, you’re different to the 1.5 million other people that are selling the exact same thing as you? That comes down to credibility and building validation with your users from day one. There are things that you can do online and that act to differentiate you from day one for your brand.

[0:15:42] CH: What kind of stuff?

[0:15:43] GC: Okay, the way that we’ve laid out our book is that we talk about the psychological behavior behind users and why it works. For this particular chapter, for Build a Better Brand, we talk a lot about social validation. This would be, if I walked into a room and I’m wearing, you know, ripped clothes, haven’t done my hair, and then I walk in and you introduce me. It’s like, “This is Gian and she’s an expert in digital marketing.” Your instant reaction, whether you consciously or subconsciously acknowledge it is that “Yeah, she’s an expert, she’s not really presenting herself like the way that you're introducing me.” The same kind of things take place as soon as you visit someone’s website. There’s still websites out there and it’s still s hocking to see sometimes is that, they don’t even align text with images, there’s no call to action. There are very simple basic things that you need to be doing from day one and with templates, Word Press for templates for example. Like $40. There’s no reason why you can’t have a sharp looking website these days, you don’t need to be going and paying thousands of dollars to website design agencies unless you’re a big established brand, the smaller brands starting off, there are so many things that you can be doing for very little money that are going to make you look professional. Going to make people stand up and take notice of you, going to make people go, “Okay, you’ve clearly defined on your home page, what you actually can offer me and what solution you can offer me to the problem that I’ve come to your website for.” Everything from the way that your content is written to the way you’ve laid out your website and how easily accessible the information is that you’re trying to present to the user. And how you’re actually converting like what kind of call to action you want the user to take. If this is not very easily seen the moment someone clicks on to your website, then you’re going to lose them.

[0:17:48] CH: How many clients do you to see getting this right? Because it’s shocking to me how many get this wrong but are you having to correct 50% of your clients when they come to you 90%?

[0:18:06] AA: At the moment, we’re working with medium to enterprise clients. A lot of those are established brands or at least a few years in. Most of them have that sort of side of things in order, not all of them, there’s definitely some that I don’t know how they got where they are. But in terms of smaller businesses and you know, startups that we talk to at our conferences and all of those sorts of things. The vast majority of them are focusing enough on that and that’s because most people out there, you know, you’ve got a startup, you’re just trying to get some revenue in the door, trying to grow as fast as possible and many people skip the initial steps of branding and credibility building which they just really are pretty integral to long term success.

[0:18:51] CH: When they have the corner stones of their brand covered, they go on to what you call the numbers game which is increasing your traffic to your platforms. How do they go about doing that? You know, that was one of the questions where we had initially. Just about everything works and that’s the problem. It’s about really understanding what is going to work best for you and cutting out the noise and focusing just on a channel initially or a couple of channels initially and expanding why insane success in those. Knowing how to grow into the others. You know, those SEO, there’s pay per click, there’s social media, there’s paid advertising, it’s a myriad of different things that people can do. What kind of business you’re in, how long you want to be around, who you want to be to people and weighing up that whole thing of, “Do I care about the brand and long term sustainability of the business or do I care about quick revenue?” Most of the time, people are going to say, “I honestly care about both.” The SEO and content marketing piece is great for branding and long term. Great for traffic generation, free traffic moving forward and high-quality traffic but typically, people need to balance that with some sort of paid advertising to bring in some really quick revenue even though it’s going to cost them. It's usually about that balancing act initially.

[0:20:28] AA: This is one of your real specialties. I remember the first time we chatted Aaron and you were kind of laying out some of the results you’d gotten for your clients, your specialty was getting them on to the first page of results, really super high and for very competitive keywords. I don’t know a whole lot about SEO, I’ve gotten lucky once or twice, but can you kind of break down what your process looks like, an overview of your process for optimizing for SEO and then what you tend to do. Do you start with SEO and then move to paid? It depends on the needs of the client and it depends on the size of business. Often times, medium to enterprise clients who come to us saying, knowing what they need, we need better – well, knowing what they want, we need better rankings and organic traffic, or we need someone to manage our paid media. When we’re talking about smaller businesses, it’s about understanding the budgets that they have and the goals that they have and working back from there and their level of progressiveness.

[0:21:41] CH: Let’s make up an example. Comparable to your biggest client, let’s say, a Fortune 100 client comes to you and they’re obviously very established, but they want to improve their SEO, they have a huge budget, where would you start with them? Maybe I’m still being too vague.

[0:22:02] AA: No, that’s good. In terms of SEO, in its most basic form, it covers three different areas, it’s technical, content and links. Technical being, is Google able to index and calling the site, is it loading fast, is Google liking what it sees? Things like rich snippets and you know, there’s a million things that go into it. That’s more of a hygiene factor and with bigger business, it’s typically one of the more important things because a lot of the businesses already have a lot of links and a lot of content. Minor technical changes can have a big impact and it’s the reverse for smaller businesses. There’s the technical. In terms of content which is the second part. If you want to be found for something online, you need to have the right content for it. It’s about building our content strategies, making sure you’re creating fresh, relevant content on a regular basis that is answering questions and solving problems and genuinely being used for content and having that on your website. We make sure that that’s in place and then from the links perspective, what I’m talking about links, it’s still the biggest part of the whole algorithm, still over 50% of where side ranks is going to come down to the quality and volume and relevance of links that you have back to your own website. For example, Forbes decided to write an article and about businesses in your industry and linked back to you within that article. You need to be focusing on those very things when we have a big business coming to us. Those are the three pillars but really, there’s a lot of breakdown past that happen underneath that from analytics audits to keyword research and content gaps analysis, content strategy development. You have the content creation, the link acquisition work is massive every month, it’s basically online PR and outreach.

[0:23:59] CH: Yeah, with the link acquisition, like that’s 50% of the game right there. I’d imagine that is a huge portion of the work that you’re doing. A quick side note that you include in the book which I really liked is basically, all the rules that you lay out, the process you lay out, everything can be exploited or it’s easy for marketers to go to the dark side, right? In this particular example, how do you go about this in an ethical way that’s sustainable and doesn’t lean on shortcuts that might get you in trouble?

[0:24:41] AA: That’s where some of these pillars tie into each other. If you look back at the content piece, the whole idea about building the right content strategy and good content to begin with is that, if you’re answering questions in your industry and solving problems, you know you’re going to have a hunger audience behind that content and you know that that content is going to be a value to people. If you are creating valuable content, it means, when you have a team reaching out and making people aware of your content on other publications, that whole process of gaining links is a lot more friction free. You’ve been genuinely creating value and then you’re encouraging people to link back, you know, that’s one way, there’s other one ways like creating content for other websites. Reaching out to sides. Saying, “I’d love to contribute” and create a great content for their site and within that site, you're linking back to your own great content as well as other great content around the web. There’s endless numbers of link acquisition tactics that keep you wearing that white hat so to speak.

[0:25:44] CH: Okay, now that we know the rough overview of how to boost your traffic. Like you said, all this stuff is so – you can go really deep down the rabbit hole on everything that we’ve mentioned. In the book, it will go even more into detail but now that we know how to boost our traffic, and that basically, everything works, you’ve just got to pick what’s right for your business. How do we improve the engagement with our audience, right? This is a lot of people’s problem is, they’re content creating machines and they’re doing all this stuff but no one’s around paying attention and so what do they do?

[0:26:26] GC: First of all, if no one’s around, they haven’t built their traffic.

[0:26:30] CH: Well no one’s sticking around, I mean.

[0:26:32] GC: Okay. We need to start nurturing the audience. In this particular chapter – what I wanted to just quickly mention on the last two chapters is we’re talking about – you can go the negative way and there’s always a way to exploit a tactic is that the core of every single chapter that we talk about, there’s this – keeping very close to the line where we’re talking about credibility and authenticity. As long as you genuinely are creating content that comes from a good place that genuinely is solving problems, these are the people that will go the distance because they genuinely have a good message that they want to share and solve a problem for. When we get to rules of engagement, we talk about pro social behavior which basically means, actions that benefit others that are prompted by empathy or moral values and a sense of personal responsibility from a brand that for more than a desired personal gain. I think, when we’re talking about looking at social media for example which is massive in the market right now. End users now have all the opportunity in the world if they have a bad customer experience to lay it out on their social profiles. Some of the greatest brands have actually turned these kind of comments around, where the engagement has been negative but they take accountability, they own the problem and then they tell them how they’re going to fix the problem. What you’re noticing is that while you are trying to fix and you are genuinely coming from a place of good intent to protect your brand and to do right by your customers is that you have all of these other eyeballs watching as well, which is your other community and what you are actually doing is seeding within your community this sense of loyalty which they don’t even realize is happening from a psychological perspective because they are watching you take responsibility for your brand when things don’t go right because you know, we can’t all be perfect. I think when it comes to engagement, it’s about giving back. If you have the ability to give back once a month or a free trial of your product or something that will benefit your customers that is not necessarily going to benefit you initially, you will start to build this sense of loyalty with your community.

[0:28:56] CH: Well what is a good example that comes to mind of a company who is interacting that way with their customers that really stood out to you? I mean the classic example I think of was pre-internet days when Tylenol, somebody poisoned a bunch of Tylenol and Tylenol recalled all the products and they gave out a great statement that the stock recovered immediately, and it actually went up and now like you said all that stuff just gets blown out of proportion so quickly or it can. And things get taken out of context, so companies are paying attention to what their customers are saying and everybody else in that audience is paying attention and they are creating loyalty that way. Are there any other good ways to engage and create that loyalty you are talking about?

[0:29:51] GC: Okay so one of the best example that we can give you are engagement and how to build that with clients is we reference the movie Focus with Will Smith and Margot Robbie and basically the scene where Nick and Jessie are about to bet against a business man at the football match and Jessie has to pick a number that the business man is looking at that he has in his head basically and if she picks the right number of the football jersey then they stand to win millions of dollars. But she’s quite overwhelmed and nervous about making this decision because there are so many numbers on that field right now, but she ends up picking the right one and then what you learn after is that this was no accident that for the whole day, this businessman had seen this particular number and was given say, I can’t remember exactly. I think it’s 58 or 55 and so he gets 55 dollars change and then someone walks up to him and says, something about “55 this or 55 that.” And basically, the whole day it was strategically planned that he was drip fed this number. So, by the time that he had to pick a number, he’d already subconsciously picked it without knowing that he had done that. This is how basically the rule of engagement really works, is that as long as we keep providing content that is truly solving a problem, it’s authentic and we are not pushing sales and coming from a point of where it had –

[0:31:27] AA: Self-serving.

[0:31:29] GC: Yeah basically self-serving, that as long as we keep going down the path, by the time the decision process happens to purchase, we have already subconsciously seeded our brand in our consumers. So, this can be the way we manage ourselves through social media, it can be the way that we talk and professionally speak and the content tone that we don’t try to be above everyone else, but we are trying to make more of a conversational term where we’re imparting knowledge. Solving problems, speaking, guest posting, there are so many different ways, but the point is that the sales cycle isn’t always going to be two days or three days. It’s about drip feeding the message that I truly want to solve the problem. So by the time that comes around, you are actually the front of mind.

[0:32:20] AA: Yeah, it is not a single touch sales point. You know it is multi-touch and it’s also not having done one particular thing well. It is a combination of being a good brand, engaging with people in the community in the right way and being a value consistently through all channels and the result of that means that you are top of mind when someone’s ready to engage with your brand.

[0:32:42] CH: What about when you’re ready to sell something and you want this audience that is engaged with you to buy from you?

[0:32:52] AA: As in what do you do next?

[0:32:54] CH: Yeah, let’s talk about conversions. What do we do?

[0:32:58] AA: That’s a huge thing in itself as well. It ties in really well with everything in the previous chapters. You have built the credibility, you’ve built the brand, you’ve been engaging really well, you’ve got multiple touch points on people, people that is seeing your content everywhere, people are understanding that you are of value and they want to be involved in your brand and what it means is that at the point where people are ready to buy, the decision is almost already made for them. And you have done a lot of that pre-work already and that is fantastic and you know for those that aren’t quite at that point either, there’s a lot of stuff when you want to talk about less of the psychological stuff while that is incredibly important and more of the tactical stuff in terms of conversion optimization on your website and there is a million things you can do there optimizing and changing copy and improving copyrighting. There’s moving and redesigning landing pages, there’s buttons and calls to action and so many different things that matter. The reality is that you don’t do it with guess work. Use tools, use heat mapping and eye tracking and understand what your traffic is doing before you make decisions as to what you are going to change and how you are going to change it and go based on the data and that’s what we do. Our whole business is based on using the data.

[0:34:18] CH: What kind of tools do you two depend on? What do you find most valuable as your personal resources?

[0:34:27] AA: Yeah there’s a basic ones that is free and everyone has access to like Google Analytics. It is fantastic for understanding what people are doing. There’s other ones like Crazy Egg and Hotjar and Kissmetrics and there’s AB testing tools and when you want to start looking at enterprise level, there is Sentient AI that can test millions of different changes at the same time. There’s endless amounts of tools, really though you don’t need anything fancy to begin with. Start with what’s free and what’s available and learn what the data means and that’s the most important stuff. It will also always be there, but it is understanding and strategizing based on that data that makes all the difference.

[0:35:11] CH: So do you have any particular examples that come to mind of making certain changes that really surprised you at how big of an impact they had for your clients?

[0:35:26] AA: Logically, we always knew that if you are getting millions of visitors a month to a website then minor changes can have a big impact but we were engaged with Sales Force in Canada to do a conversion optimization body of work over a number of months and you know, I don’t have the numbers of the top of my head but the increases in conversions and just lead form completions just was mind blowing even for me. I personally wasn’t involved, our team was involved and did all the work and I helped at strategy but when they came back with the numbers and the results and I would see that, it was mind blowing and it really speaks to the value of conversion optimization once you have traffic. A lot of people try coming to us saying, “Oh we want to improve how many people are converting” and they are getting 300 people a month to their website and it’s like you’re just well off there.

[0:36:24] CH: Yeah that’s not statistically significant yeah.

[0:36:26] AA: Yeah, so when you do have that traffic and then we have seen a lot of successes in diversion optimization for clients when you do have that traffic it is exciting because you’ve got stuff to work with and you’ve got tools to test with and that flood of traffic is coming through and if you use it in the right way, the change to business is amazing. In those situations, we’ve had people that come to us with millions of visitors per month and they are still on the acquisition part wanting more and more traffic. And part of our jobs as strategists is to say, “Yeah you can get endless amounts of traffic but all we need to do is increase conversions by this tiny percentage and your revenue would double,” and when it’s understood in that way, people are excited, and we enjoy being able to implement that for them.

[0:37:16] CH: Yeah, no kidding. What is a statistically significant amount of traffic in your eyes? I know it varies industry to industry but at what point do you say, “Okay now we have enough data”?

[0:37:33] AA: As far as we are concerned, if you’re not getting tens of thousands of visitors per month I don’t particularly want to spend hours and hours and lots of resources on trying to do what has to happen to improve those conversions because it can be expensive, you know? Doing new landing page designs, you are rewriting copy and you are doing it all multiple times and you’re testing and it takes a long period of time. And if you are at the phase where it could be more rewarding to spend that time on acquisition, we are going to do it. If you’ve got the traffic and there’s something badly wrong with the site, just terrible conversions like zero point something percent then we are going to be sitting there saying, “Look this is the part of the funnel that needs fixing” and so we focus on that. It is really individual situations and us being good digital strategist for clients that can point them in the right direction at any time.

[0:38:30] CH: Once you have conversations taken care of now, you’re in this relationship with your audience, your customers, your clients, what happens then, how do nurture them and make them into lifelong customers?

[0:38:47] GC: That is my favorite chapter. It’s the Delighting chapter. It’s where we go back and we strengthen that relationship with that customer and we call it Delighting. So basically, it’s where you go and you intentionally want to make them feel good about themselves. So you might have like when you get a shipment and you get that little box and you open it up and there’s a little extra thing in there or they might put a little thank you card with the chocolate, like if you are product based company. Or it might be a voucher for next time for 10% off, or it might be that we’ve elevated you to a gold member status of our rewards program. It is something that tells your customer that we didn’t just go, “Hey thanks for your order. Never to talk to you again. We’re just a churn and burn kind of business.” It is something that goes back to that reiterates the message that you are important to us that we’ve enjoyed doing business with you and that we really want you to become a brand advocate. Because one, you like our product or service but two, you like who we are. You like how we did business with you. You like how we managed the process and you like what we stand for and then you become so invested in that relationship that your customers end up becoming brand advocates and spreading your brand message for you and that is the most ideal situation and they come from some of the smallest little actions that you can do from a business perspective.

[0:40:19] AA: And part of the idea of the whole book is that people don’t like being sold to and if you can change that set of people that are actively coming to you because you are educating and helping and providing value and then you give them an experience that is above and beyond what they are hoping for – you leave them being advocates. You leave them being the best referrals that you can get and you leave them in a place where everyone is going to be talking about your brand and your business in a positive light and it just makes the whole system work and flow properly.

[0:40:52] CH: With having done all of this for your clients – how many years have you two been in business again?

[0:41:00] GC: Ten.

[0:41:01] CH: Ten, cool. All right, so a full decade of doing this for your clients, tell me maybe one of your favorite success stories or your favorite client transformations that you’ve had and how the lessons in your book really affected their business or those people’s lives?

[0:41:25] AA: The thing is that when we are looking at medium to enterprise companies, we are looking at companies that are so significantly large. People like Sales Force and Ford and IBM and Intel and massive companies, where I would love to say that we have impacted the whole company and the whole business and everyone’s lives. But when it is of that size, our main focus is on the person or the people that we are engaged within the business and making them as successful as possible in their actual roles and their job roles.

[0:41:59] CH: That’s what I’m talking about.

[0:42:00] AA: Yeah, so it becomes a lot more focused around getting them promoted and I guess for us, the best wins are the fact that – the people that usually employ us are digital marketing managers or marketing managers or CMO’s and when they move their job, they jump from company to company after every however many years, but the biggest most successful thing for us is that we’ve picked up new clients wherever they go because we make them successful wherever they go. And that is something we have seen with, I can think of probably 10 different clients or CMO’s at the moment, that have stuck with us since right in the beginning for seven or eight years when they’ve moved from company to company. As far as I am concerned that’s success from what we see as an agency and success for them as well.

[0:42:57] CH: I love it. Yeah there is no stronger testament I think to a business’s reputation in service, quality and in everything than the number of years that their clients have stuck with them. So that’s pretty remarkable but I do want to press you if there is one in particular that you could pick of one of your favorite success stories what would you pick?

[0:43:25] AA: Okay, so the favorite success story doesn’t necessarily mean what made that particular person successful. I would say one of mine and Gian might have her own ideas here but one of mine was Sales Force in the US, the head office, we were engaged with them to help with content marketing and SEO and drive acquisition through their developer blog. We became aware that they had received a user generated content penalty from Google. And that meant that they dropped 30% of their traffic overnight which for a business of that size, you can imagine how massive that is. So, we identified that penalty and made the business aware. In terms of penalty removals, sometimes it could take three months, sometimes six months, sometimes it never gets repaired and businesses have shut down because of penalties. With this particular one, we were able to help Sales Force get rid of that penalty within I think it was seven days. Between seven and nine days and completely restored all the lost traffic and that was a massive win not only for us but for the business and is something that has stuck with us as a really good achievement and that we have been very happy with.

[0:44:41] CH: Oh yeah, I bet they love you two after that and never wanted to let you go, that’s incredible. For anybody who is listening who may not understand the panic that something like that can cause, I mean I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.

[0:44:58] AA: No and we touched on doing Black Hat and gaining the system and all of that earlier, that’s what it leads to. Websites and businesses have genuinely shut down overnight especially around from 2013 onwards. It was horrible. Agencies went out of business and businesses went out of business and everyone suffered and you know it is not worth any of it specifically if you are an agency. Ever doing that for any of your clients you are absolutely killing yourself. You are risking the livelihood of these businesses and everyone employed by them and it blows my mind that people, that agencies and they do-do what I have seen. I have seen that as much as last week, they do that for clients still and I don’t get it.

[0:45:47] CH: And there is no such thing as Google penalty insurance. You are gambling the livelihood of everybody who’s involved with those businesses.

[0:45:58] AA: Yeah, it’s horrible. It’s just not worth it. You know you want to build a long term sustainable business, don’t take shortcuts and put in the hard work.

[0:46:05] GC: But that is a great idea for a business out there if anyone’s listening.

[0:46:10] CH: It actually is.

[0:46:11] GC: It really is.

[0:46:12] CH: For those who know, yeah. So I’ve got two more quick questions for you two. The first is how can our listeners potentially connect with you and talk with you guys if they’re working or if they fall into the category of the types of businesses that you work with or simply follow you in your journey?

[0:46:31] AA: So I would rather anyone reach out that could possibly do with some help from us. It doesn’t matter the size of the business or your role or if you are in an enterprise or you are starting up, as we have indicated we are happy to help out even if we can’t offer services, we are happy to point you in the right direction. So please feel free anyone to reach out anyone that’s listening and needs some help. You know the other part is that if we are doing our job right that you should be able to search for us and you should be able to find us anywhere, Google, LinkedIn.

[0:47:04] CH: Yeah, I have found you on the third page of Google it was the weirdest thing.

[0:47:08] AA: The third page of Google? I am pretty sure that you –

[0:47:11] CH: When I searched for your name.

[0:47:12] AA: I’m pretty sure you searched for my name the first 10 pages every result is me which means I have done the right job somewhere.

[0:47:24] CH: Good man, yeah. I expected nothing less so well done. So what is the best way for them to connect just through any of the first 10 pages of Google or?

[0:47:37] GC: Yes, so you can either go to our website at Louder.Online or LinkedIn, we are always on LinkedIn and there’s always people messaging and reaching out and we share a lot of content there too that might be of value for people, if they’re facing problems in the digital market.

[0:47:53] CH: Perfect. All right and the final question is could you give our listeners a challenge, one thing they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their business?

[0:48:07] GC: Offer your clients one thing that will make their lives easier, that you can give away, whether it be to make you know about the problem, not about your product or service but give one piece of information away, this week that you know that your customers are looking for or having a problem with right now and give it away or give something away from your company to show that you’re not all about the bottom line. That you genuinely care about your community.

[0:48:39] AA: I’ve got my own one as well. Sit there and think of a handful of customers, go grab some post cards and write a postcard from wherever you are to those customers, thanking them for their business and just wishing them well and hoping that they’re having a great day. There’s nothing beyond that in terms of trying to get more business or anything like that. It’s simply delighting the customers. A hand written postcard for absolutely no reason out of the blue would be an amazing thing.

[0:49:07] CH: The book is, Faster, Smarter, Louder. Gian, Aaron, thank you so much for being on the show.

[0:49:13] GC: Thank you.

[0:49:13] AA: Thanks for having us.

[0:49:16] CH: Many thanks to Aaron and Gian for being on the show. You can buy their book, Faster, Smarter, Louder, on Amazon.com. Thanks for tuning in on today’s show. If you liked what you heard, here is what I want you to do next. Open up the podcast app on your phone or iTunes on your computer and search for “Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn” and then click “ratings and reviews.” Take 10 seconds to rate this show or leave a review. It is a small favor but it’s really the best way to show your support and give me feedback and if you know someone else who’d love Author Hour, take another three seconds to text them a link to this episode. We’ll see you next time.