Building Customer Loyalty and Encouraging Repeat Buyers

The Small business show episode 233 for Wednesday, July 24, 2019.

Welcome back, everybody.

I figured I'd say that instead of greetings, you know, because I like to change it up.

Welcome back.

Yeah, it's where the Small Business Show. The show by, for and about small business. Sponsors for this episode include textexpander.com podcast and Go Co SBS. Now, you've already gone there because, you know, that's how it works. You go to those URLs, you learn about that thing that you. You've helped us. We'll tell you in a couple minutes why you've gone to those URLs, but that's how you've helped us. And for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out on the west coast, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm good. Craziness, you know, but like, extra craziness. I have more travel this summer than I've ever. Than I've had in a while. Like, just lots of little trips. Most of them are actually business trips. I've got a couple of, you know, things for. In fact, when this show airs, I will be in Montreal with. With my family, just doing some vacationing.

Yeah.

Which is nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. But that's cool, man. Like, I am, I am so thankful I had the foresight to turn down several theater shows that were offered to me for this summer because I could have fit them in, you know, with. I'll get a sub for this weekend that I have to be away here and there or whatever. But it would have killed me business wise, like already. It's killing me business wise, like, you know, just staying on top of everything, knowing that I have all this travel and projects and, you know, I mean, all the stuff that normally goes on.

So it's the power of saying no, right?

The power. It's true, man.

Yeah, we did, I think we did a show on it. Something at some point.

The problem is, you know, I, I suffer. I like terrible fomo where I know it's like, like, in fact, this coming weekend I'm going to Max Stock Expo, which is a show that I love. It's really hard to put a business benefit on it like that that pays for the cost of the show. Like there is a business benefit, but really it's a show for consumers and other podcasters. There's about 150 people that go, it's like camp. We all just like to see each other. It a lot of these People are my listeners for, you know, for my Mac Geek Gab podcast. But let's face it, you know, there's far more than 150 listeners to that show. So, yeah, you know, it's a.

It's a branding show. Right. The brand is your you. You know, that's right.

And so I get to go and see these people, and I love seeing these people, but I can. It's hard to justify, especially when it's cutting into, like, family vacation time or whatever. But I did have one theater show that I was. And what's the public spin on it is. Which is true, actually. A bunch of the actors got sick. It really was. They were worried about people getting sick and lots of stuff happening. So we actually canceled the first weekend of this, and it opened up my schedule. But the whole time, I was like, dang it, I'm gonna miss out on Max Talk. But I committed to this theater thing, and it's the right thing for me to do. That's the right decision. And then as soon as I got the email that they were canceling the first weekend, it was like, yeah, oh, great, I can go to MaxDock. I did. Hadn't canceled my hotel yet. I was good to go. So booked my flights, and off I went. So we'll go.

Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

Yeah.

So, hey. Yeah, that's good. So today in the show, I want to talk about a few things that I'm really passionate about. One of the. The main topic is after the sale happens and the opportunities that you have there to build loyalty, encourage repeat buyers. I think that many, if not most, companies kind of fall down on it. I have some examples of people that do it. Great. But opportunities in communicating with your customer after the sale, shipping and packaging, handling returns, handling warranty requests. Most of those are either overlooked or people put obstacles in front of them to try to slow down returns. Maybe no warranty issues. And I want to flip the script, if you will, and turn them into opportunities to make your customers love you even more.

I love it. I love it. The first thing I want to do is I want to talk about something else that I Love, which is textexpander@textexpander.com podcast. Yes. I know I don't like to put words in your mouth, but I believe with this, I could very easily say, we love this. It's true. So textexpander is one of the most important efficiency tools that you can have for your business. Right. Oftentimes, efficiency and accuracy are at odds with each other. Textexpander makes them partners and friends. Because there's all those things that you need to send out via email, right? Or any other written form, text or whatever. You have letters, perhaps. But those customer service responses, like, we're going to talk about here in a minute, those frequently asked questions, those replies to sales pitches, right? You want to make sure that you get these out in a timely fashion and. And that they are perfectly accurate and exactly what you want to deliver. So what do you do when somebody asks you, hey, what can you tell me about, you know, the ad rates for this show or whatever? It's like, well, I go into my email and I look for the last time I sent that to somebody, and I copy it, I paste it, and then I have to tweak it, and I got to remove all those stupid, like, reply headers and all that stuff and format it, right? And make sure, oh, did I get the person's name right? No, no, no, no, no. This is what you use textexpander for. You put that snippet into textexpander and then it stays there, and you format it perfectly right there. If you want to have someone's name in it, you can actually leave a little spot for a variable. It will prompt you every time you use it. Put the person's name in, or it can pull it from different places. It's really smart. And that way you get accuracy and efficiency all at once. Because all you got to do to invoke it is click the mouse or type a little shortcut, whichever way you like to do it, and boom, it's right there. Even better, you can share these snippets with your team so everybody has them up to date at all times. If you got one person on your team that's really good at writing and editing, really, editing is even more important. Editing is the most important part of writing. So find somebody that's good at editing, let them be the manager of these snippets. And now everybody's got a perfectly edited response. It's awesome. So go check it out. Textexpander.com podcast. That's where you go. You'll select Small Business show from the list. We would like. That's. That's how we think it should work. And, you know, that way they know we sent you, but just go there. Textexpander.com podcast Our thanks to Textexpander and Smile for sponsoring this episode. All right, man.

Awesome. Yeah, that's great. So, yeah, when you make the sale, I always think of it that's half the battle because I think how you handle things after the sale, especially, you know, nowadays because it's so competitive, you have a chance to really make a impact on your customer after they buy from you and developing customer loyalty and encouraging them to come back and buy more. And, you know, I want to talk about these four areas of after sales situations. And I think a lot of them are looked at as kind of necessary evils or just some automation thing that we put in place and boom, it's done or a headache to deal with. And so what I want to try to do is convince you that they're actually hidden opportunities to impress your customer and to connect with them on an entirely different level than they're used to earn a different way. They're going to pay attention to you more if you change things up a bit. All right, so let's talk about communication after the sale. You know, think about when you buy something and we're going to talk about, you know, E commerce. That's my, sure, you know, wheelhouse. And so. But it could be the same a physical store if you're sending out an email. But think about the email confirmations you get when you buy a product. Most of them are, you know, really boring. Hey, here's your invoice. Hey, thank you for your sale. We're going to ship it quick and, you know, that's about it. Not very exciting. Sure. And I, I would, I would argue that if you, the emails you send out don't put a smile on your customer's face, you're really missing an opportunity. They need to, you know, some little tidbit of joy shows up in your email box. And it's different than the 50 other companies that they, that they're getting emails from. That that stands out and I think is a great opportunity in the thank you for your order email. So, you know, just think about your customer. They're really excited. They bought your product, they ordered your service, they're looking forward to getting it. They're looking forward to solving a problem with it. Make sure that your email confirmation continues that excitement. You know, you may have to use a couple extra exclamation points. We talked about pacing here a couple of shows ago and you know, you're going to assume, hey, this customer's excited to get my product. I'm excited that they brought it to them. How am I going to show them that in an email? And you know, you have to do that.

That's a great in. Yeah, asking that question. How can we show you how excited we are, you're not here in front of us. So we can't smile and have the whole team come and applaud you.

Shift your hand. Thank you. Thank you. Get that visual with your face, with your smile. You're right. You have to convey it.

You got to find a way to convey it. And as soon as you have that in your brain, now go back and look at the last 15 receipts you got from different companies and find what you don't like and then fix that in yours. That's right.

Or if you find one that made you laugh or smile, that's the one. Copy it. Like, hey, I'll change this up. You know, ex. And then in that email, you know, humor is great. I mean, for. For years. Well, the last few companies that we had to have, like, the whole dreaded phone tree when you call in and all that kind of stuff. Well, I hate those. So I put my voice on them and I answered and I said, you know, I know I hate these things as much as you do. And so I'm going to try to make it as painless as possible, you know, and I'll. I'll do whatever. And I had a whole script that I went through trying to interject a little humanity into this automated thing, a little humor. And, you know, a week didn't go by where a customer would be like, that was great. I love that. You know, and when you picked up a customer service call that's been on hold for five minutes, you know, that's the attitude you want the customer have. I love that. You know, phone, voicemail, tree, message, not, hey, I'm really upset that you've kept me on hold for five minutes. Right?

Yeah.

And so using humor is really important. And if you're not the funniest person, find somebody that is, you know, one of your. Your kids, your friends, your partner, your employees, you know, put somebody in it that's got a little edgy humor to it. So in that email, you know, you want to also explain how this process works when. What's happening now, you know, is it. Is it just, boom, you're going to some big faceless warehouse and we're going to ship your thing out, and now we're too busy for you now we're trying to find the next customer. No, show the cycle, you know, manage their expectations, make it interesting, you know, make it up. Make a thing. Our little robots are crawling on the warehouse now to pick up your item, whatever, make it a story, make it part of your company. Company story and make it interesting to read and put it smile on their face, they'll remember it.

One piece of advice, if you're going to get cute with something like that, right. Like putting the robots on the floor. If you're gonna have little elements like that, put it on your calendar to change it every six months, maybe every year, but certainly not any longer than that because yeah, it's, it's cute, it's fine, but it does get old, especially when people realize it's repetitive. Now maybe you could also automate having, you know, put a dozen of them in. Yeah, sure. Randomly choose one for every order is something like that, you know, or at least change it up semi regularly so that people don't just get bored of that, you know, and if you've got longtime customers, they'll be really excited three years from now when you go back and say let's use the robots again. You know, like, oh, people like, oh, the robots are back. Like that can be an actually an exciting thing, but you don't want it to get stale and yeah, and those kind of cutesy things get stale faster than anything else.

Yeah. And I think that the tools that are available now for personalization and automation, you can create 50 of those emails, you know, and write 50 different little snippets. And there's a company called Klaviyo K L A V I y o clavio.com that I've just had lunch with the guy that runs a business that actually the founders have been on the show and they were talking about how some of the things this, this new software does and I mean it was just massive personalization and I was totally impressed with it. But that's a really good point, is to change things up.

Yeah, just keep it, keep it fresh, keep it, whatever. Yep, yep, that's right.

And then the next part, you know, the next communication you're going to have with them is that you've shipped their product or there's a tech on the way or whatever. You know, this is again awesome news. It's a big deal that you shipped it out quickly, that you're responding quickly to their service call, whatever, talk it up, continue the excitement, you know, and give a lot of information. Hey, here's your tracking number. Of course, here's when we expect it to show up. And again, a little humor goes a long way. Those, those are, those are great. And then the last one I think that I've seen more lately, which is, I think great, is an email that your product or has arrived and Even I used your mechanic.com last couple weeks ago and you know, they're telling me I got a text when the tech was on the, on the way with tracking from their phone, which was great. And then when they rolled into my driveway, I got another text that said, hey, your technician is here. And I was able to walk out and hey, I see this guy sitting there. So that your item or your, the you know, person, however, whatever business you're in has arrived is awesome. And in that, you know, is there, are there any tips they need to know? You know, hey, you just got the product and you know, here's some unboxing videos. Here's the top 10 FAQ questions that we get with this product. You know, you may want to look at it before you open it up and rip it all apart or something like that. Giving them that information, I think is, is really powerful.

Yeah, that's, yeah, you're right. There's more and more of that happening where you get like the, your, your box arrived or your box is arriving tomorrow. No, before you stab it with a knife, you know.

That's right. That's right.

That kind of thing. Yeah, super valuable. I like it.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, what you're trying to do is continue the conversation, you know, and to continue to convey to your customer their value. And most of it can be automated. You know, you don't, nobody's in there typing these emails out. You just set this stuff up and let it go. Don't miss the opportunity to increase that connectivity that you make with your customer. You know, I'm a huge fan. I'm involved heavily in the social commerce business now and it's all about tremendous personalization, you know, and I always tell, I'm advising some people in that space and I'm like, hey, if you don't want to use your own photo, go pick a stock photo. I don't care. But have a picture. Have a picture of yourself. And we're going to talk more about that in the next section, which I'm really passionate about is, which is shipping and packaging.

Oh yeah, you're the master of that, I will say. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we've shipped, you know, in the last, you know, 25 plus years that I've been doing this stuff. You know, even just in the Apple space. Millions, literally millions of boxes, either parts or Macs or, you know, I'm going.

To hold you, I'm going to hold you back there because, because I want to talk about this. And the first thing I want to do is thank our sponsor, Go Co. You know, one of the most pivotal decisions you make when launching your new business or your new project or your new whatever it is is your name and your website URL. And then you go through that disappointing process of checking if the domain name for this business that you've got in mind, it's already taken or whatever. Like that part is really frustrating and time consuming. Don't worry, you can be like us and get the name you really, really want because you can choose a domain name like us that ends in dot Co. You know, business show co. Here we are. And it's the ideal way to get online because it's short, only two characters. Makes it super easy to remember. You all remember it, right? You know, it's businessshow co. We say, email us at feedbackusinessshow.co. you already know how easy it is to remember because we've trained you just because that's how we work here. You know, they've got so many people registered, but there's a better chance of getting the exact domain name you want compared to a dot com. And Dot Co offers startup goodies, some freebies and perks and resources and other great tools. But what they also offer for you because you're a small business show@business show.co listener, if you go to Go Co SBS today, you can register your.co domain for just $5. Plus you get three months of their website builder and hosting services for free. So Visit Go Co SBS, register your co domain for just 5 bucks. Get 3 months of their website builder and hosting service for free. And Our thanks to go.co for sponsoring this episode. Shannon, I want you to tell me about packaging because it is. Folks, it is time to go to school. Here we are.

Well, you know, we've had some great guests on the show for, you know, talking about packaging and in logistics and especially now. I mean if you're in any kind of business that's, that's shipping products, that the box is really the first tangible, you know, physical experience that your customer is going to have with you. So you really need to make your, your box should be awesome. I mean, if it shows up and it's just this brown box with the UPS label on it, okay, great. And it can, but what a missed opportunity, you know. And can you afford a custom box that that's printed? Maybe, maybe not. If you can't afford a custom box, what about a, you know, some awesome stickers to make that box look more custom? You know, stickers Are inexpensive. You know, can you ship a unique looking box? Can it be in a different shape? Can you do, you know, make yourself stand out? You know, there was a. A guy I love to follow, Seth Godin, and he wrote a book many years ago called the Purple Cow. And when you ordered that book, it came up, it arrived to you in a purple milk carton. And that was the box. They shipped it and it was awesome. And it got all kinds of press because of it and everybody posting that stuff. So spend some time with your box. I will tell you, with Tech Restore, we wanted, you know, this was. It was my second company that was involved in logistics and, you know, laptops and electronics back and forth overnight all over the country. And we had convinced DHL at the time, and they were expanding in the US to put our box in every van in the country. And so we wanted this really special box. And so we had this box, you know, made. And it was this big laptop box, but it was bright yellow, just. And you could not miss it. And it was, you know, had these kind of caution tapes, you know, graphics on it that said urgent shipment. And on the back of the box we had all kinds of information. You know, one of the big things that we loved was the company that we worked with was all run. That made. The box was run on solar. So, you know, we would have a big thing, you know, this box was made by the sun. And. And then just. Just kind of. People love to read that kind of stuff. And we would get tons of comments and people would see that yellow box all over and it worked great for us. It wasn't cheap, but it. You remember it, you know, that's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah. So if you can do that. And maybe, like I said, maybe you can't do the tooling and the. And then print, you know, thousands of boxes at one time. But I know you can afford a sticker. Go to Sticker Giant or Sticker Monster. There's a bunch of inexpensive. That market's been turned into a commodity like everything else. You can have stickers created that are. They're really cool and maybe you need to put multiple ones on them. You know, put them on there.

Sure.

And I think that's great. You know, another company that does a great job with their box is Newegg. And they have a series of boxes and the printing on the outside of the box has phrases on it. Like, you know, here comes your awesome. You know, the excitement's inside the box. I mean, they do some really great phrases that are funny. And you can see, search for Newegg box online and you'll see people posting pictures of it on Instagram, all that kind of stuff. Don't miss the opportunity for the outside of your box to make a good impression when it's getting left on the doorstep or handled by whoever. Yeah, really important.

That's really smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so you know, your customer has the box and they're going to open it up, you know, you're the first look again, you're going to make another impression. What's inside the box? A bunch of, you know, crappy non recyclable peanuts. That's not a good first look. You know, is this, are they. Because people get a box, they kind of shake it around a little bit. Is your product banging around inside there? That's bad too. I don't care if it's, you know, a brick, they don't want to hear that. And you know, what are they going to look at? And this is where I come back to that photo. A photograph, a printed photo is one of the most powerful ways to connect with another human if you can't be there. And you know, with our social commerce business and our handbag business, you know, we include a picture of my wife and I and we're standing right there. Thank you. You know, we're telling him that on this little insert that I print, you know, I print them on my printer and I print 100 or 200 at a time. And, and it's, it's cheap and easy and it's a very good way to do it. If you don't want to put your picture on it, put it. How about a photo of all your employees saying thank you. You can certainly make them stand in a for a photo, right? And hey guys, we're all, we're all going to, you know, they'll do it or you know, again, go pick some stock photos out, you know, go to Shutterstock or wherever you get your, your photos and just use that nobod. Nobody knows.

You could put a picture of a dog and say, this is, you know, Timmy, our company mascot, saying thank you.

Yeah, yeah, that'll bring a smile to people's face. And it is different because I'm not getting a picture. You know, most boxes you get don't have, they have just a quick printed little invoice out. Don't miss the opportunity, especially for a small business. This is your niche. This is your way to stand out from all the big guys that don't put the time and effort into it. In. You know, to putting something in there that should be the first thing they see when they open that box.

You know, I will challenge everyone that's not in a physical business like me. Right. We, you know, we're in the digital business, and all we sell is digital things. And over the years, I've come up with different ideas that I haven't implemented. It's just those crazy, you know, like we talked about last week, the. Why can't we.

Yeah.

And the reason. The answer to. For all of these ideas is because we haven't yet. Like, that's the only. There's no good excuse. But, you know, I thought about when most of our business was in web ads and we could deliver people there. You know, like, we would send people screenshots, like, oh, yeah, here you go. And I thought, man, why don't we print that nicely and send it to them in a FedEx envelope? Right. It'll cost us whatever, 10 bucks or something. Whatever. The campaign's worth way more than that. And I guarantee you, we are the only people doing that. Like. Like, guaranteed.

Yep.

Because no one's even going to think about it, let alone actually do it. We thought about it. We still didn't do it. But, you know, thinking about what you just said, you know, we have this bird. We have this. This parrot. Hector.

Hector D. Bird.

Hector D. Bird. Right. Yeah.

She.

She actually has a long history in the Mac software market. She was with Ambrosia Software for a while, and now she lives with us. And Ambrosia started it as, you know, she was their mascot. And so we could have a picture of Hector, and we could even say, hector says thank you. And then in parentheses, we could put. Actually, Hector doesn't say thank you. She says some things that really aren't family friendly. But what she means is thank you. Right? Like, you could be funny about it.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And no one would forget it. People would ask about Hector. They would go follow her on Twitter, and I'll put the link in the show notes so you folks can follow her. But so I'm thinking now, challenging. I challenge our listeners, so, you know, challenging myself. How do we do this with the podcast business? Like, what can we send new clients to make them to. To make them remember us? Right? Like, yeah. And really, the answer is anything, it doesn't matter, because no one else is sending them stuff. Like, we could just send them a hat and a postcard from Hector saying, thank you. Here's a hat. Or here's a whatever. Yep.

Yeah. And so the other thing I like to do with that, that thank you and that photo to get them to hang on to it is I put a coupon code right below that. So it says, hey, keep me, because this is good for whatever, 10 bucks off your next order or in the case, you know, let's say you wanted to sign up for your newsletter. So with, with Tech Restore, what we did is said, hey, if you go sign up here, we will double your warranty. So if you bought a refurbished product and it had a 90 day warranty, go sign up for our newsletter. Excuse me? Sign up for our newsletter and we'll give you, you know, six months instead of three months. So some kind of incentive to get them. You're trying to get them to hold on to that and not just toss it.

Right.

And I mean, you know, in a, in a perfect world, they'd stick it on their fridge with a magnet and they go to get something to eat. They see me, look at that, oh, I need to go buy some more stuff from these guys. Right?

And throwing in the warranty, like that's really smart because that act doesn't actually cost you anything. If somebody, if somebody called you five months into a three month warranty because you're the customer service maniac I know you are, 99 times out of 100, you would warranty that product just like they bought, you're going to fix it anyway.

Yes, you are going to fix it. And, and you might as well just do it up front, you know, and get that, get them to sign up. So that insert is really a great opportunity. And I saw something, one company. Who was it that did this? Well, I have to think about it. It was a Mac or iPhone, iOS company, they had a little card inside their little insert and it, it said two things which I was really impressed with. The first thing it said is, you know, are if you're happy, please go here and leave us a review. And then you flip the other side of the little card up and it's like, had an unhappy face, unhappy. Please go here so we can fix it. Yeah. So you're encouraging them to leave a positive review, but trying to stop them from going online and complaining because you're like, hey, we're here to, we're here to fix that problem. I thought that was a really nice idea.

That's really smart.

Yeah, I like that.

I like that.

The next thing that I'm, I'm really passionate about is returns. You know, returns are a fact of life and you need to embrace them. Rather than putting up obstacles to avoid them, you need to, you know, make it easy, make it quick. If you make it easy, make the process. And I use the word fun in quotations. Yeah. You know, make it, make it easy, quick. It's just going to happen. You, if you do that and you issue refunds quickly, it's going to get customers buying more, buying again, and it's actually going to lower the number of returns as a percentage of your sales. It absolutely works.

I believe that because if someone returns something and it's a process, and I put emphasis on that word, they are not going to buy from you again. So certainly for that customer, the ratio of, you know, purchases to returns is going to stay unfavorable. But if you make it super easy, then there's a much. I believe that, that there's a much better chance that they'll buy something and then your ratio goes up by definition.

Yeah. And even doing the. It took me a long time to get out, to get to embrace this. But even doing free returns, where you include the label, the return label, that in my personal experience, does not increase the number of returns you get it actually as a percentage of your sales, your returns would go down because you offering a level of confidence to the customers, like, hey, we know you're going to love this thing, but if you don't, okay, great. And then we tell them when we do the return processing, keep that coupon. Don't include that back inside the box. Just hang on to that because when you're ready to come back, I want to give you that discount. Right. So again, you're just encouraging this relationship. You're taking the transactional nature out of it.

Right.

Because you want to have this connection with those people.

That's it. You are. By giving, man, I never thought about it this way. But by offering free returns. Well, let me reverse this. By not offering free returns, by essentially charging the customer for what it takes to ship it back, you are saying, okay, I see this relationship as over and I'm trying to get out of it.

Minimize.

Yeah, minimize your cost to me. Whereas if you say, oh, yeah, we'll take it, you are communicating, you are still valuable to me. Of course I care about you. I get that this particular thing didn't work out. I don't care about that. I care about you. Yeah.

And I want you to come back, save the coupon, you know, that kind of thing. So again, you've spun this whole return process on their head now. You know, there are people that are going to Abuse things. And you can kind of. But you can push those people out. And. And I have a comment about those type of people too. But as we wind things down, the same goes for warranties. It should not be painful to get warranty support. Look at your process, remove those obstacles, make it quick, automate it and personalize it at the same time, and you'll build that customer loyalty. Because when people talk, what you want them to say is, oh, I didn't like that. But man, they were great. They took it right back. They never questioned me. And they gave me a coupon off on my next order for another product that I'd like that's a success right there. And, you know, for returns and warranties, don't let the outliers decide your policies or set your procedures. These are the people that we all. Customers that we all have, right? They're the, the 1% that are just a nightmare and cause lots of grief in your customer service department and all that kind of stuff. But those people are going to happen. But you don't want to treat all your customers like your worst customer. You want to treat them like your best customer. Really important. Don't set policy and procedure based on your worst customer. That's. You got it backwards. You know, how do we treat our absolute best customer? That's how everybody gets treated. And then, you know, you put some little policies and procedures in place to eliminate and minimize those outlier 1 percenters so they don't disrupt everything like that. This rough really works because, you know, I can tell you from experience, if you treat these situations right, returns, warranties, your packaging, how you communicate, you again, you build that connection with customers. I mean, with Tech Restore, we would have, you know, quotes from customers. You know, I'm in love with a company called Tech Restore. And that's because we focused on this kind of connection. Because, yes, we were repairing a lap laptop, but we're really in that customer service business and that kind of thing. And that's how, you know you're doing it right when you get those kind of comments. And that's all I have to say about that topic.

No, that makes sense, man. I like it. It's good.

But I'd love to hear, you know, your stories and what you do for your business to stand out, you know, and that's at feedbackusiness show co. That's feedbackusshow co.

I think you said feedbackusinessshow. Co.

I did. You got it. But before we go, I want to come back. We started a new segment Last week called Small Business Therapy, where Dave and I talk about our businesses because unbeknownst to you, oftentimes we, when we call each other up or get online and connect to do to record the show, we spend the first 15, 20 minutes talking about what's going on our business. Now we're going to do it here each week so you can kind of get an inside glimpse of what's going on with us. And Dave, I think you're up this week. What's going on with your businesses right now?

I am. Well, we've got one. I mean, there's lots going on, but I'll focus on one thing in the interest of, of efficiency. At Mac observer, we. There were two things that I wanted to do this year. One is leveraging, like getting more value for us out of mailing lists. And we're starting to do that. We're not, certainly not at the end of that. But, but we've opened that door and that's going to fine. We can talk about that sometime. But. But the thing I want to talk about today is, is the other thing, and that's video. We really, for the past several years, but arguably never in our history have we had a good video content strategy. We've had some good video content at times, but nothing regular. And so it was on the list. And really, I thought, I, you know, we're not experts at this, which is why we don't have this. So we're going to need to hire somebody that is an expert and bring them into the team. And as often happens, somebody on the team, like, you know, serendipity, you start thinking about something, you start being, trying to, you know, focus on it, and then you find somebody on the team that has some interest. And that's what happened. Charlotte Henry, one of our writers. Yep. She has an interest now. What? She, she has an interest in it. She is a, I mean, she's a fantastic journalist, so that part's easy. She has done television before, so she gets, you know, that part of it. But the whole concept of web video in terms of promotion is the part where, you know, where we don't, we still don't have any internal experience with it.

I see.

Sure, sure. You know, she knows how to produce the video and create it and all of that, which is great. You know, like, that's also necessary. But we are struggling with, you know, how do we position it, you know, for, for lack of a better term. And maybe it's exactly the right term, the SEO side of video. Right. How do you position your content? How do you pitch it? What's the right length? What's the right, you know, do you use keywords like how do you focus so that people searching on YouTube will find these things? And how do you promote and all of that stuff? And so, so it's been, it's, you know, we've got these videos coming up regularly now. I mean, we, we only started this six weeks ago or something. So it's been, it's, you know, it's been, it's been a process.

Right, sure.

So, yeah, great. But it's, you know, it's, it's this, the, the stumbling block of, okay, now how do we get people to see these videos? Like, that's, that's the question.

Yeah. And I love the concept. Okay, we're going to start this new thing and then, and, but now we have to. How do we.

Now we need to figure it out.

Find it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that's really cool.

Yeah.

Well, you know, if you're, if you're listening to this and you have any experience in positioning, you know, videos and online or YouTube, you know, feedbackusinessshow. Co share your tips.

We'd love to hear it. Please. I'd love to hear it. And if you've truly got some expertise, you know, I might even hire you. So there you go.

Yeah, there you go.

That's good.

That's great. Well, awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that and thank you everybody for listening. You can give us a review at businessshow.co review. We would love to hear from you. That's a huge way to help us out and to help us grow the show.

Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, you know what? We've got one review that I think I've got right here in the queue that I can read as we are, as we are exiting today. And this review from printer Dave from Canada says a must for any small business owner. Small Business show is hands down one of my favorite podcasts out there. I learned so much from the guys. And if you own a small business, do yourself a favor and subscribe. I also find that just by listening, I'm even more motivated and excited to work on my own business. Thank you, Dave. So this is review helps us on so many levels, right? We like just reading what you said is awesome. We also get to share it with everybody, so that's awesome. And then having reviews really helps. You know, we just talked about getting exposure for our videos at Mac Observer. Well, we want exposure for this podcast too. And Apple's algorithms, pay attention to how many reviews we get, and then they start to highlight shows that are getting some traction there and actually have listeners that are paying attention. So, yeah, business show. Co reviews. We'd love to. We'd love to.

Reviews with. With an S. Yes.

Or it's reviews without an S. I've got it configured both ways. Yeah, of course.

Reviews. I love it. That's great. Yeah.

Yeah. So cool. Yeah. All right, well, that's what we got for today. Thanks to our sponsors. Textexpander.com podcast go co sbs. Thanks to all, all of you. Thanks to printer Dave from Canada. See you next time.