Marketing Across the Stages of Your Online Business

Emma:
So welcome back to do the Woo BizChat. Yay, the podcast where you usually tune in for insightful conversations, but you usually miss out on all of our interpretive dance routines that we’re performing in the background. But that’s all about to change because today we have our first video. Thank you, Bob, for answering our annoying, annoying requests. And I apologize for anything that you’re about to see. I can’t control my face.

Adam:
So I think this is one of those things of we complain so much and then now that we’ve got it like, oh shoot, wait, no, this is a bad idea.

Emma:
It’s like, wait, that starts today. My jokes don’t land then you most definitely did not. So anyways, I am Emma, and as always he is Adam, and we are joining you today this fine, fine day. How’s it going? How are you?

Adam:
Oh, it’s so good. The weather is fantastic. It’s beautiful. It’s a crisp day, winter day and yeah, life is good. I’m excited about what we’re going to be talking about today because I get to learn from you.

Emma:
Yikes. And what are we learning today?

Adam:
Ah, I have this good idea for a title. We’ll see if it actually ends up being the title. See what today’s title ends up. But it’s marketing across the stages, not the ages, but the stages of business. See what I did there? You’re not impressed

Emma:
I read it, but I like your delivery so much better than when I read it in my head

Adam:
Than when you read it. Yeah, no, it’s all in the how you say it, which, okay, so that’s one of the things, it’s the attitude so much so of your company and what is your attitude? Are you enthusiastic about what you’re doing? There’s so much we can unpack all of that. But yeah, like you said, reading something is a whole lot different than the delivery and when the emotion, the attitude, your personality comes across.

Emma:
So where would be the best place to start from this? I feel like you can’t just start from, there is no beginning, there is no end. What question would you start with?

Adam:
Where do we start? Alright, so let’s go across the stages of business and we’re going to break it down into probably three or four major stages of business. And we’ll start with the solopreneur. There’s a guy or girl, a person who said there’s a problem to solve and I want to solve that and we’ll focus on this industry of woo and WordPress, web development and all of that that we’ve got here. And so that I think is the place to start. Let’s discuss a few of the ideas that if you are just getting started, you have limited time, you’re all by yourself. What are the things that you are going to do to begin marketing? Should we define marketing? Do we need to define what marketing is?

Emma:
How does one define marketing? Is there specifics that you would like?

Adam:
Yes. Okay, so here’s how I think of marketing is that marketing is all of the communication that is done about your business and you have internal communication, you have external communication, but it’s all the communication. And we’ll kind of break it down into a few different columns and see now that we have video, I can use my hands,

Emma:
I know right?

Adam:
To emphasize things, but I don’t know if my milking a cow. No. Oh man, we’re going to have so much fun with this. Oh, it’s so dangerous. I don’t believe Bob, let us do this anyways, marketing,

Emma:
Marketing,

Adam:
You’ve got these different columns and those columns are going to be your advertising. That is the paid stuff that you do. You pay Google or Facebook or whoever to advertise for you, and that is your advertising. That’s how, that’s one section that’s paid. Then you’ve got your branding. Branding is what other people say about you. It’s like what you have done for other people to talk about you. And included in that is going to be, even the visuals, your logo, your color, it kind of all fits under that branding, your tone, your voice, your branding. Public relations is also in here. That’s when you do something that is newsworthy or that is worthy of media outlets talking about. And that’s a free thing. That’s the public relations where you are speaking to the public about something that you have done. Those are kind of the big areas. Did I miss anything?

Emma:
Yeah, I think even to go even further zoomed out, just marketing in general is just kind of your strategy, your strategic process of creating, communicating, like you said, delivering and then exchanging value to kind of attract and retain clients and customers. It’s kind it.

Adam:
It’s doing it on purpose, it’s communicating, it’s all of those things happening and actually having a plan that, oh, we are going to advertise. Oh, we are going to show up at this event and all those kind of things.

Emma:
And I think it really involves understanding the needs and the desires of who your target audience is or who wanted to be. And using that kind of knowledge to build relationships, end up driving sales and like you said, increase the brand loyalty that you have, but there’s so many more components in it that you already touched upon. I would like to later maybe discuss owned versus paid versus earned.

Adam:
The thing I want before we get too far into this that I want people to understand is that this is something that feels very complicated and complex because it is in a way in the sense of all the different things that you can do, but don’t let it overwhelm you because at the same time it’s very simple and we all understand this and I like to use this. What’s it analogy or metaphor? I don’t know the difference.

Emma:
Somebody can correct us in the comments.

Adam:
Tell me if I’m giving you an analogy or a metaphor. When the cool kids at school, we talked a little bit about this is what does it take to be a cool, the attractive? I don’t mean good looking, but people are naturally attracted to different individuals and they just kind of exude this attractiveness, this cool kid. When I say that, Emma, what stands out? Do you have a person in mind that you’re thinking of? How would you describe that person?

Emma:
I have no idea why, but the title is golf ball came to mind. I don’t golf. I have no idea why. That was the first thing that popped in my mind. I

Adam:
Know why.

Emma:
Oh, why?

Adam:
Because there was probably a cool kid who was wearing a Titleist hat.

Emma:
Maybe my dad.

Adam:
Your dad?

Emma:
Yeah. My dad was a cool kid. He’s still a cool kid. I dunno why. Talked about him in past tense. He’s in school. Legit.

Adam:
Yeah. Let’s go back to middle school, high school. What made someone, one of the cool kids,

Emma:
This one girl in school I remember had the most beautiful hair. It was just like that. I don’t know. Again, she just kind of carried herself well with confidence and I was over here just like I’m a nerd. I could do two plus two.

Adam:
I love that. So she could have, and I would imagine that some people, so I’m guessing her hair you have just curly, a lot of it was kind of big

Emma:
Like volume.

Adam:
Volume. If she had been embarrassed about that, she could have tried to hide it, put it back, wear at something to not highlight that. But she’s like, no, this is who I am. This is a part of what I love about myself. And in that confidence she was like, yeah, I’m here. Here I am. I’m showing up and so is my hair.

Emma:
Yep. Take it. Relate it. It worked. Yes, it did for me,

Adam:
I think that junior high was really rough for me. I was not one of the cool kids. I was so dwe be I parted my hair down the middle and I had my cousin called it like a butt cut. It was down the middle and it was so

Emma:
Like if you cut my hair off here,

Adam:
Yeah, but if it

Emma:
Went like that, the McDonald arches.

Adam:
Exactly. So there was the butt cut.

Emma:
Oh Adam,

Adam:
I tried so hard to be cool. I wanted people to like me so bad and it didn’t work very well.

Emma:
So you started marketing yourself.

Adam:
I started to care less about what I thought other people wanted me to be. It’s ironic. Stop trying so hard. Stop, don’t be needy and like, oh, these are the things that I am good at. These are the things that I’m comfortable in. When I conned my wife into starting to date me, my now wife, I kid you not really bad long hair. And what was bad about is I had been a lifeguard and I had put this stuff in it to lighten it. It was like this lightning gel stuff. And so I had the whole, it was not a good look, but somehow even in that, because I was like, yeah, screw it, whatever. I’m just going to own this.

Emma:
So you were the girl from middle school that was girl was your hair.

Adam:
I thought I recognized you. We go way back. But that was part of it is hey, care less about what other people want you to be and be confident in who you are because you have value. The girl you were talking about, she had this attribute of awesome hair and she’s like, yeah, I have awesome hair. It’s not a big deal. I’m not going to, but it was part of who she is. So let’s bring this back around to something useful to people and being confident in your value proposition that yes, we solve a problem and the reason we solve a problem, and this goes into the storytelling of your brand, is somebody had an issue, I had an issue and I believe so much that this issue needed to be solved. I started a company to solve this for others. After I figured it out, I’ve got a solution.
And if you have this problem, this is the path, this is the guiding thing to help you also solve that problem because, and I think there’s a bit of confidence and not everybody is going to have this problem, but for those of you that do have this problem, this is the best way to solve it. And it’s that sitting in that confidence. And you can do that as a small business owner, as a solopreneur who is just starting out. Because ideally you started a business because you saw hopefully a fairly singular problem. You figured out how to solve it and now you have the difficulty. What we’re going to be talking about is as we lead through this is how do you tell people how you tell other people about it? And so let’s go from there. Alright, so we got a solopreneur. What are some of the things that they can do?

Emma:
So I think you touched on very important thing is find something that you’re confident in that is your niche that you don’t even have to think about. If somebody just asked you a question and you could just fully answer it, be an expert on it and then start sharing that with the rest of the world. I guess, and I kind of want to bring up, again, owned media. This is where I would kind of fill this first part and no matter what your business size is, so you could be a portfolio website or a small business owner or just starting out an e-commerce or something like that. So your owned media is the content and channels that you fully own. It’s the name there

BobWP:
You go.

Emma:
But it includes your website, your blog, if you write tutorials, email newsletters that you send to clients or potential subscribers and your social media profiles.

Adam:
Yeah. One thing I want to just touch on is that, yeah, ironically websites are really important.

Emma:
Who knew?

Adam:
Yeah. And what I love about planning your website is that the act of planning out your website is your marketing plan in that you have the chance to in your building your website, that’s one of the very first steps in businesses that any of us will take. And it’s going to be what are the words that we’re going to use to describe the problem and how we solve it? And in the copy for your website, you have that chance to build your own voice. Are we fun and happy? Are we serious and businessy? Are we, what are you and be yourself, be true to who you are in your brand. Are we bright, vibrant colors? Are we more subdued? Get that figured out in your website and then everything else can reverberate and echo from that.

Emma:
Yeah, I think it’s important to remember that you have complete control over your messaging and your branding and it’s good best to figure that out at the beginning. You don’t want to come back, I don’t know, five, 10 years later and do a whole rebranding campaign unless that’s something that just happens, but decide those things. Yeah. What is your color palette? What is the tone that you use when you’re writing or you’re writing a blog piece or you’re writing your social media or you’re writing to a client? I like to think of all of these things with your website, your social media as your digital real estate. And it’s kind of like everything is under your control and it’s also quite cost effective. Of course there’s the initial setup fees with website hosting. They can be minimal costs depending on what you need and who your hosting provider is.

Adam:
Speaking of hosting, so let’s jump into this real quick.

Emma:
Did you mean hosting or,

Adam:
Alright, so speaking of hosting my first, so I heard about hosting her before I saw hosting her. And what I mean by that is a good friend of mine, Jonathan, he brought me in to help with the hosting her kind of their first like, hey, we’re at WordCamp US in San Diego is right after the Covid restrictions were being lifted. And my first view, and I’m curious, I could use the way back machine and go look at hosting like early websites, but was hosting always this bold purple? Was that, how long has that branding been around?

Emma:
I wasn’t around when it first came out, so there’s different generations of it, but I actually recently they did, like you said, a way back machine where they brought in, how we went into the way that our logo looks like and the purple the same, oh sorry, violet for gte, if you’re listening,

Adam:
My mistake.

Emma:
Yeah, the violet is, it’s always been there, it’s always been strong. That’s always been consistent. Even the way that the H looks, that’s just been more redefined , there’s a meaning behind the design and everything, but I dunno why 2017 is popping up, but I think it’s maybe just because that I think was a turning point. But yeah, the Violet has always been there, but now it’s very much well known and attached to the Hostinger name.

Adam:
What was interesting is I, I actually got a chance to help be on the team to look at what the booth was going to look like before and see the visuals and we got a chance to give feedback. And what was neat is I was getting to know the personality of hosting your leadership like, oh, that matches, they are being true to themselves in this fun. Do you see that the branding of hosting her kind of matches the origin story, the people who really started hosting her?

Emma:
Yeah, definitely. I think at the end of the day it’s less about hosting her and more about the client, but if there’s a way to bring attention to, so that’s one of the things that I love about the booth that we’re doing now. It’s like something flashy to bring you to us, but then if you look, it’s all about clients. And so it’s bringing it back full circle to help with some of the stuff that we’re talking about, this owned media that will lead into earned media, like spoiler alert. But it helps. It’s definitely consistent across everybody. I think there’s definitely a culture with Hostinger that’s very apparent in the branding.

Adam:
That’s awesome. There’s this brilliant marketer on TikTok right now, which apparently maybe by the time this airs TikTok will be gone, but he’s this guy from China that it’s like TLC signs or something. Make LED signs. That’s kind of a boring, like okay, you make signs for businesses that would go out front and whatnot and they’ll do custom work, but what he does is he will take a meme and he’ll dah dah. But anyways, if you’re looking for a sign that, and it’s so brilliant because he’s hilarious. He’ll put on a Donald Trump wig and just whatever it is, and it’s this, you caught my attention and now let me tell you about how great my signs are and we can do custom work for your business and dah, dah, dah. And he’s brilliant people that you’ve reached it. When there are other accounts that are showing off your work, they’re just replaying his ads is really well done and it’s just this kid in China who has a camera and does sound effects and stuff. It’s brilliant.

Emma:
And that’s a perfect example of earned media in a weird way. And for those of you that don’t really know the difference or the term, the definition earned media, it’s kind of the exposure and the tension that you get or that you gain organically through just word of mouth or social sharing or more OG ways like press coverage and you don’t pay for it directly because it is earned because people find your content valuable or newsworthy or trustworthy and it’s free promotion. And so it’s nice.

Adam:
There’s a lot of examples like Apple before they release a new phone for years, it’s not as much now, but there’s still a whole industry around what are the rumors around, we have this glimpse of this thing or someone took a photo of what we think the next iPhone’s going to look like. There were people that would fly drones over the Tesla factory as it was being built and there were whole channels around people speculating. And so there’s that element of when you get that big people care about you and they’re looking for the leaks and all of that. So that’s that end of the spectrum where you’re just that massive and successful. But even as an example, this guy on TikTok, he was being himself just being a funny, goofy kid that wanted to tell people about their company’s signs and how fast that you can get accustomed sign. And so don’t think that you have to be a Tesla or an Apple to do that. You can be authentic, be yourself and be entertaining, be interesting and fun to be around

Emma:
If you want to be. Yeah, But there’s also a middle ground too. So we talked about the solopreneurs, the small business owners, and they’re doing more owned media stuff that’s cost effective. And then we talked about the big dogs out there that are, people are just spying on because they want to get any glimpse of something, but then there is kind of a middle where you can invest a bit more like paid media.

Adam:
Let’s get to that. Okay, so we’ve got, when you are starting a business, you’re the chief everything officer, you’re the CEO, but that means you do everything

Emma:
Marketing team of one,

Adam:
Be confident in who you are and what the benefit of growing is that you get to start finding other people to do parts of the business that you don’t want to do. That’s the thing of success. If you are an engineer or okay, you’re building the product, it’s probably not in your best interest to do all of the accounting. That’s something that fairly early on in a business you can hire someone else to take care of your accounting marketing depending on where you’re at in that phase or your own personal ability to communicate. That is another area where you can offload parts of that fairly quickly. And I’ll give as an example, if you are the engineer doing the coding and the work, maybe your time is best spent doing that, but maybe your business is more of a marketing business, like, okay, well spend more time on that.

Know thyself and as you have success, bring in people and it can be through a small contract. Maybe you contract with someone before you’re ready to hire a full-time employee or even a part-time employee. You can do those things. But as you grow then you can eventually say, okay, well we had this contract, but now we’re ready for this team and bringing in and people to market. But that’s the growth pattern. So what are some of those activities that, let’s give a vision for a small company. You’ve got some margin, your sales are going well, your word of mouth is where that is going to come from, but you recognize that you have to get more than simply word of mouth. That’s not enough. That’s not a sustainable business in most cases. What are some of the different activities that a company and WordPress should do?

Emma:
I think you can kind of split it into two ways. There’s the organic marketing and then there’s the paid performance marketing and both of these things you need to invest in and you need to hire specialists that you trust that they can do the job better than you can because you don’t need to do everything. You can’t do everything. So depending on what your niche is as well, maybe it makes more sense to do organic first, and I’m talking about SEO content, some YouTube videos as well. All of the stuff that you don’t have to pay a person to promote your stuff. And you can do a lot of this yourself as well and have it fall under that owned media. But then if you kind of want to branch out a little bit more, like you were saying, you have a little leeway, you have a bit of budget, then I would recommend maybe going more towards looking into influencer or partnerships or some PPC, maybe even sales, but if that’s right for your company.

And why I say these things is because you can use the things that you already created in your own media, your content, your website, your blog, your social media, all of those things, and start utilizing these, let’s just talk about PPC for an example. You can use all of this content that you already have and the stuff that you’ve already created and it’ll amplify your reach. So it allows you to get all of your messages that you want to get in front of your target audience a lot quicker than you would with just word of mouth organic. And it does, but at the same time, it supports your owned and your earned media because these paid ads can drive traffic to your website, which you own, and then it can boost your content visibility that could basically help you earn shares to your earned. And it’s just this very nice circle. You get immediate results for some type of short-term campaign or launch and eventually people start hearing about your name more and more, and then it goes kind of full circle.

Adam:
Success begets success. Yes, as you are successful, it has this momentum. And one of the most difficult parts is getting the ball rolling. That inertia, it is getting it

Emma:
For sure, deciding what things and testing which things make the most sense, and how long should you test something before you’re like, whoops, maybe we should have started with something else. But that’s why you hire specialists for that.

Adam:
Shazam, there’s a few things that hiring specialists. I also think that being confident to be clear. So if you started a business to solve a problem, it’s likely that you would have been a customer for your future business, if that makes sense. I started a business and so if you can think in the mind of that, describe your ideal client. Where are they consuming media? Where are they learning the craft of this business? Exactly. An example is that I go to YouTube to learn a lot of stuff. An example was there was a coffee maker that we had that stopped working and there was a guy on YouTube that had step-by-step exactly how to take the part and all the little clips and stuff. There’s no way I would’ve been able to do that on my own. But there was a YouTuber, he taught me how to fix coffee makers

Emma:
And that. Yeah, and that’s very interesting because I am not a video visual instructions type of person because they annoy me sometimes when they speak too slow and then I get frustrated, I don’t want to do the project anymore. So I’m more of a skim, get the vibe and then do it. So this is a good thing. Know your target audience so that you can do it

Adam:
Because you’re smarter than me. I need visuals.

Emma:
I blank you,

Adam:
I need, no, I need to see in that coffee. I need to see what clip you’re doing. You can’t describe it to me. I need to see it. And so that’s an example of if you are someone who learns from YouTube, there’s a good chance that people who have the problem that your company is trying to solve. So keep that in mind. Where are they going? And an example is that the person who taught you how to build a website, and there are lots of YouTubers that do that. That person’s recommendation is pretty valuable. So the example of the coffeemaker guy, if I was in the business of repairing coffee makers, which I am not, and this guy recommended a specific tool case on, yeah, this is the set of tools. If you’re going to be fixing coffee makers, this is the set of tools that you really need. Like, oh, I get out my credit card. The same thing goes, you’re building websites, here are the plugins that you’re going to really want. Or here is the hosting that I use because it’s like hosting or does this.

Emma:
And I think it is. And I think there’s two versions of that in every company, not only Hostinger, but in any company, when you get to a point where you feel like you want to do this is you can make partnerships with people and it can be just a partnership, it can be a paid partnership. And then it gets to the point where some people just say it because they’ve had such a good experience and that almost comes like a trust review. So there’s different variations. There’s a different scale of the example that you just gave. And so it’s not just one way or the highway, depending on where you’re at in your business, in your WordPress site, decide what’s making the most sense. Don’t just go straight and pay some micro influencer to say nice things about your coffee machine. Make sure, just make a nice coffee machine. And maybe they’ll say it because they just enjoy it or Adam remembers his coffee machine and this guy and we give him a little shout out.

Adam:
There you go. There you go. On the side.

Emma:
Yes. Okay, so we have that. We have the paid, we have the earned, we have the owned, we have hiring specialists, we have talking about your brand, your fonts, your logos, everything. What would we do next?

Adam:
Alright, I think so again, marketing is the planning, the strategy of all of that and knowing, okay, where in the phase of business, how much margin do I have to hire versus I have to do it myself. So thinking through all of those things, make sure you know that. And that’s an activity you should be doing regularly is, okay, where are we at? Setting aside a budget actually saying, okay, we’re going to take 15% of profits and we’re going to use that for marketing or whatever it is, pick a percentage and stick to it. And there’s a few things that I want people to think about is that in any of these activities, it’s rare that it will immediately work and will continue to work always over time. We live and die so much by the numbers and the KPIs and the stats and stuff and those are all nice things. But in the world of communication and branding, it isn’t a mathematical equation that we can depend on. We know that it works, some things are going to work better than others, but that is going back to having someone who is a professional is going to have more insight in that. So I can use my hands now.

Emma:
I know, I just feel like sometimes I want to do this just to distract you. Bob used to cut it out in the back and now he can’t.

Adam:
Can’t do it. Can’t stop. Okay. Alright, so let’s think about the few different places where you need to be. Again, if you were your customer, where are you showing up? Google? Like, okay, I’m going to search for something. I have a question. SEO is how you’re going to rank. You got to get on the first page of Google or you don’t exist kind of stuff. We’ve all heard that. So that’s a place where you need to spend energy. You can pay Google to do that. You can also work on your SEO and the answer is actually both pay Google and work on your SEO.

Emma:
A hundred percent, yes.

Adam:
Another activity is events, right?

Emma:
Okay.

Adam:
Yeah,

Emma:
Sorry. No, I’m like, tell me more sir. Tell me

Adam:
More. So what I would say is as you, okay, you’ve started doing your website is great, you are working on your blog or your YouTube channel or getting your own communication out there. You’re posting on social media, you’ve got a pattern figured out for, I’m going to maybe create content once and pay someone else to place it in different formats on the different social media places. Doing that type of work I recommend. But then what comes next and maybe at the same time is starting to attend events before you sponsor events, show up and be there. And that would be in our world, we have word camps and now we have events like CloudFest and PressConf. So those are some of the events that are coming up that I recommend in this industry. And then there’s also the online events like WooSesh and some of those different ones as well.

Emma:
And like local meetups too, if it’s WordPress specific, but also marketing related. There’s a lot of, I dunno, I think there’s a London Summit marketing something that’s happening this weekend that’s all about covering these things. And I agree with going to these things first as an attendee and just to go there with confidence to build, put yourself out there just to understand who are the other people that are coming to these things, what do you do? Why are you here? Talking to them, building your relationships and also building your, not community but connections.

Adam:
Just

Emma:
Think of a Rolodex but start to build that and understanding, getting feedback from them. Do they have the same problem? What would be a solution for you? It can be a lot of things that you can get out of attending an in-person event.

Adam:
One of the activities that I’ve done with some clients is before they have had a booth, we have gone just and kind of walked through where all the booths are and we’ll critique the booths and what is it about that booth that people are coming to and making them stop. And so this is an activity that we’ll take notes, but it’s kind of a fun way to do before you sponsor. That’s a worthwhile use of your time is obviously you can hire someone to do this or you can just do it yourself where why are people hanging out at that booth but not at that booth. And there’s a whole messaging element to it and there’s a lot of science and social sciences behind a successful booth.

Emma:
So you would say attend these industry events, start to build a relationship with yourself out there, get some research data, whatever. Also look at potentials and what to do and what not to do when you want to make the decision. But how would you go about saying when somebody should make a decision from going from an attendee to a sponsor?

Adam:
It’s the margin. It’s where, so for instance, and I like to say that your budget is very important. A lot of people are like, oh, I don’t want to budget that. I don’t know where I should spend a budget is, don’t be afraid of it. It’s a good guess for what the future brings. And if you aren’t able to budget margin for these extra activities, that’s going to be rough and it will limit your growth. If you need every single dollar just to eat, that’s going to be tough as you have success and your success comes from the free activities, like okay, we now have some margin. We’re going to this coming year, our goal, we’re going to try and spend $20,000 on marketing this year and half of that will be on events, something like that. Just pick a number, stick with it. It’s hard to do. It’s difficult. Like ah, that’s $20,000. You serious? Only do that when you have the margin to do it. But yeah, go for it.

Emma:
Yeah, and I also think ROI on a conference is, or any type of event is, I don’t know, just a conversation on its own, it’s

Adam:
Own thing.

Emma:
And I think it’s important to remember that you need to set realistic boundaries and goals for, I’m going to get this back, but don’t forget about all of the things that you can’t really, the things that aren’t as measurable. How do you measure word of mouth after an event that you sponsored? You can’t really, unless you put an air tag on some of everybody followed them around or something like that. But that is something to remember those spillover things that happen over time because you won’t see those numbers as tangibles like everything else.

Adam:
We can think of this a little bit in the world of investing and gambling as a type of thing where you put money into something and there’s an expectation, a specific what you’re going to get out. So someone who plays the lottery on a five bucks to 1.5 billion, do not play the lottery expecting to get that money. Alright? That is not an investment, that is a gamble. Same thing with gamble. Do not gamble when you need that. And then we get into the world of investing and speculative and sometimes it pays off. Well, Bitcoin people have done very well and they’ve also lost a ton of money if you are gambling, if you are investing and you have to get that return. So on the other end of that, we were getting ready to buy a house and the traditional wisdom is that if you need this money in the next five years for saving up for a house or something, it’s better in a guaranteed return and you’re going to get 5%, 4% or something on that, hopefully to keep up with inflation.

But you have to have that money. I can’t gamble with that. But your returns are going to be really bad and you’re going to have very, very slow growth, if anything at all. I find your margin and like, hey, I can gamble. I’m going to put my money in this speculative stock. I’m going to put my money in this more conservative stock. So the strategy is pick your plan and kind of do it all. Have some in like, yep, this is the SEO, this is the I’m going to pay for per click type of stuff, it’s going to get me a return. It is that conservative, but it’s also expensive and not, you can’t just do that. And your events, how do you judge the ROI on your event? You can say you are, but it’s all good guessing. The goal is that if you’re going to do events, get the most out of it. Alright, we’re going to put $10,000 on this next WordCamp, whatnot, or however much you end up spending in some cases for big companies, like hundreds of thousands. But we’re going to get the most out of it. We’re going to work really hard before, during and after.

Emma:
Sorry. Hundred percent. And you can actually listen to the podcast where you talk about how to prepare for an event.

Adam:
Yes.

Emma:
Yeah, I forgot we did that.

Adam:
We did do that. It was good. We did

Emma:
Okay.

Adam:
But it wasn’t video,

Emma:
It wasn’t, we should do it again. Just kidding. Okay, so now we’re talking about expanding reach. Okay, so we talked about scale of small businesses, smaller sized businesses and all of the things you could do. We also talked about earned owned, paid media and in-person events and the scale there. How do you get to be the big dog dog? I feel like there’s a big gap there. And I have a specific question for you and your expertise,

Adam:
Please. Yeah, we’re getting long in the tooth on the time you have a question.

Emma:
What would just be your advice? It could be short too, to get to be the person or the company or the place that people go to for newsworthy or trustworthy things. If you’re used to, how do I worded this question so much better yesterday, but you know what I mean. So you’re used to answering certain type of queries, but now you also want to be the trusted authority of a place, not an SEO terms, but be able to have a place where people want to maybe link back to your articles because of a type of content that you’re writing that’s not so much SEO and not so much branded, but just good information.

Adam:
So this is where I think that you then, when you have the margin to be that you then put the work in research and research helps everybody. So as an example, if you do a survey of what makes this, and I, as someone for in the case of hosting or I’m looking to have certain problems solved, it would be very difficult for me to do my own research because I’m a little person or whatnot. But larger companies have more resources to do even on the scale of academic level research that will improve the industry as a whole. And that goes like, but yeah, we want to hold it for ourselves. But that’s part of the confidence back to the cool kid that, no, we’re going to give this away for everybody. Tesla is famous for having its, they don’t patent stuff, they just show their schematics out for everybody. Like, hey, you can do this, Mr. Beast, the biggest YouTuber, he does podcasts and this is exactly how you can become me. But he is so confident that

Emma:
Nobody will,

Adam:
He’s so far ahead of, they’re not going to become him because they’re not going to put the work into it.

But it’s doing that research and giving it away and oh by the way, yeah, I’m from hosting or I’m from company X, y, Z, but do research that helps people understand the world around them and understand the business landscape. In this day and age, we have so many questions about AI and oh crap, what’s it doing? I read an article, I think Salesforce did a thing where they say they’re not going to hire any engineers in 2025. Like what? Oh geez, Salesforce, this massive company that has a million and maybe they feel like they have enough engineers, but it’s like we are having tectonic shifts in our industry and I would love to see companies like hoster, the big companies in our industry of WordPress, help me better understand Woo and WordPress and this industry, do the research and then publish that research and then people will talk about it. And so that’s my answer is that it’s expensive to do research. It’s not easy, but that’s the answer that you probably didn’t want.

Emma:
Yes and no. I’m excited for things. I think I am very lucky and blessed to work at a company that’s like, and I do, I luckily have a team that seats value in this as well. And now that I have expert advice from Adam, I will, I can keep pushing it and I think, yeah, I want to do this, so that’s cool. Okay.

Adam:
But yeah, when you see these big companies, I would say that HubSpot has done this quite well is that they show up in our industry frequently. When I ask a question, HubSpot has told me how to do this thing and it has nothing to do with a CRM. It can be just like they are and they have their whole education and courses and all of that. But I know there’s a guy named Christian Taylor Krai made, he has a YouTube channel and I think you guys sponsored some of his courses and things like

Emma:
That. Yeah, think it was good.

Adam:
Good. So you are sponsoring and supporting research and

Emma:
For sure, yeah,

Adam:
You’re putting that out there. So that’s kind of one of the big activities that the big dogs can do is we’re going to use our margin because it’s a small piece of the entire company, we’re going to use our margin to elevate everybody.

Emma:
Nice. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my camera, because it’s going dark outside, I’m starting to get these shadows in the back. It’s a little shadow,

Adam:
Finger shadow puppets.

Emma:
I feel like I want to put a flashlight right here and end this podcast with a spooky story, but okay, maybe let’s wrap it up though. What’s one piece of advice that you wish you said today that you didn’t have a chance to say could be super random?

Adam:
I’m going to just reiterate that it’s know thyself, it’s be confident in who you are and then find ways to confidently communicate that. That’s my,

Emma:
I like it. Have fabulous hair. No, I’m just kidding.

Adam:
Right? That’s a great analogy or metaphor or analogy. I still dunno, someone tell me. But yeah, own the thing that you do well and be confident. Put your shoulders back and yeah, I got freaking awesome hair.

Emma:
And I think the only thing that I would also try to reiterate is there’s more than one way and there’s more than one path on whatever level or tier you’re at. It’s not just, there’s only this one thing, the logic now the concept and just kind of keep playing with whatever it is that you’re testing out and then see what happens.

Adam:
Yeah, I think do marketing and marketing by the definition of being intentional about your communication. Earned media, paid media owned media, do those things, but do it on purpose.

Emma:
Yes, on purpose. Yeah, so, so I hope that you learned some smart ways

Adam:
You learned, good

Emma:
To allocate maybe some of your marketing budget or if you should have bigger or smaller marketing budget and tackling whatever type of media that you want to do paid, earned, owned, because covered quite a lot today. We covered quite a lot of ground and we didn’t get too specific. But if there is something specific that you guys want to know, you can ask us in the comments or send us a message on LinkedIn and we will either try to answer it or point you in the right direction of the more qualified specialist. And I am glad that everyone got to see us not dancing as much, but next time.

Adam:
Alright, be confident. Know thyself, go forth and do say yes, go and do the thing. And then listen to us next time because the next episode’s going to be even better.

Emma:
Yeah. Okay. Bye.