How Storytelling Generates Leads with Brady Smith

Hey, everybody, it's Jim Johnson here, your host with Contractor Radio and the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro, where we help contractors get control of their business so they can grow their business and experience that financial and personal freedom they were chasing when they started their business. And one of the great ways that we do that and try to help you guys, to give you practical information that you can walk away from listening to our podcast and hopefully go execute immediately to help you with your business. We try to be informative, educational, hopefully a little entertaining along the way and bring on guests that really know what they're talking about. And I've got a great one today. This guy had seen our podcast, listened to our podcast, reached out to me, and I get a lot of those. I get. I probably get 5 to 10 a week of people wanting to be on our podcast. And it's pretty rare that I go. Yes. Most of them just don't bring a whole lot of value, so we kind of skip through those or they don't apply to us. But this guy had a couple of really interesting concepts that I thought would be valuable to our listeners. And so I want to. Want to talk about that today. And this idea of being able to tell your story and improve your marketing and improve it dramatically and really kind of how people might really perceive buying and what we do there. But before we do, we gotta take care of those bills. I have a little video here from one of our sponsors. We will be right back in just a second.

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We absolutely love our friends at Atlas. If you have not had a chance to talk to those guys and work with those guys on what it is that you offer to your clients, you're missing out. They're really great on the marketing side. And that's what we're talking about today, is positioning ourselves in the market to take advantage of some of the technology that's out there today to really evaluate the way that we stand with that technology. And then finally, this concept of telling our story in a way that is magnetically attractive to the ideal clients that we're looking for. And today we're bringing in our special guest from Invicta Enterprises, President, CEO and all things awesome. At Invicta, we've got Brady Smith. Brady, welcome aboard today, man.

Hey, thanks so much for having me on. Really excited about this.

Well, it's good to have you. Like I said, kind of in the intro, you reached out to me. You cheated a little bit. You gave me a five star review, you told me how great it was, the show that you had listened to. And then you gave me three really good things that you thought you could bring a lot of value in. And I think if all people approach trying to get on our show that way, they would probably have more success. It's usually like, hey, your show is really good. I'd like to be on your show. But you were very specific and you wrote it really well. And so tell us a little bit about your background, like what's brought you here to Invicta Enterprises and helping contractors out with things with their website, with their marketing and all that good stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for the very kind words there. I'm glad that you enjoyed that pitch there. But yeah, so that really, as far as background goes, we were chatting a little bit. I've done all kinds of jobs from construction to building airplanes to delivering for ups and just wasn't really finding my stride there. Growing up, I always loved writing. I was a bit of a nerd, I think, when it comes to that sort of thing. I always got really excited about a blank page, which again, sounds kind of nerdy, but there's just so much potential. You have limitless potential when you have a blank page to work with. So that really got me into writing at a young age. And then, yeah, kind of took off from there. I got a bachelor's degree in communications and was kind of like, I can't really use this at UPS very well. So I was looking for other ways to try to use that. So got into doing just copywriting, writing blog articles and that sort of thing for all kinds of different websites, from investment advice to barbecue reviews. So pretty much anything you can think of there and just really taught me a lot about how to communicate a message. I did as much learning and research as I could to really make sure that what I was putting out there was actually going to, you know, move some results. So, yeah, a lot of. A lot of background there. We talked about over a million words that I've written over the years and on all different types of topics. So that's really one of the things that I bring to the table anytime we do a website for a client is it's not just a pretty website. It's a website that has text on it that's actually going to move people to take the actions that you want them to take. So a little bit of copywriting in there and then a whole lot of web design as well over the years, just trying to help all kinds of different businesses get their website on track.

So it's funny that you mentioned this writing aspect of things. Verbal communication has always been a decent gift of mine, but to taking that and putting it down on paper in a marketing format is always a bit difficult for me. I want to tell more like I want to write a whole bunch. Right. And so one of the things I did with my own contracting business is I went out and I found a freelance copywriter. Like, hey, I kind of know what I want down, but for some reason it's not working the way I want it to. Can you take a look and, and tell me what I'm doing wrong? And he goes, you're making it too complicated. Like, it's just. You're putting way too much down. Let's get to the brass tacks of what it is that you're looking for. And he writes it up. And I was like, man, that's so good. How'd you learn how to do that? He goes, well, I have a degree in communications and especially copywriting. You focus there. And I said, well, okay, so what's the thing? He goes, well, it really comes down to this. You have to be able to write, in a way, at a seventh grade level. I said, so what you're telling me is you went to college for four years to learn how to write like a seventh grader? And he's like, well, you know, you put it that way, but it really was like, you have to almost, and I hate to use the word dumb it down, but simplify it, I guess, for people to be able to clearly understand what your message would. You agree with that?

Oh, 100%. Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of good writing tools out there. Grammarly is probably one that you've seen YouTube ads for that. I don't know what their budget is for YouTube ads, but it's way too much. But yeah, Grammarly, there's another one called Hemingway App. And they'll like, if you, you know, have a blog post and you can put it into that tool and it'll look at it and it'll tell you all your grammar issues and it'll also tell you your grade level. So if you're wrote on a third grade level, it'll tell you third grade. If you're, you know, 12th grade, it'll tell you 12th grade. So that's a really good tool for checking out like, okay, is this on the level that, you know, people are going to be able to understand? And you're right, it's not. It's definitely not dumbing it down. It's just making sure that you're communicating with everybody. You know, just every. Just a kind of a common denominator there. That seventh grade level, that's a pretty good rule of thumb to work off of.

Awesome. Cool. So one of the things that we wanted to talk about today was this quick way to audit your website for easy improvements. That was. You gave me three items. We're going to hit those three items today. We're probably going to. We could dig in a little bit more than that. But, but what are some of the ways that these guys. Because first off, when you talk about SEO and SEM, I literally like my eyes glaze over. I don't want to talk about anymore. I want somebody else to do that for. And it's not necessarily fear, it's just kind of, that's going to be a lot to take on. So what's some of the things these guys could do out on their own to. To audit their websites?

Yeah. Yeah. I love this topic because I feel like so many business owners, they struggle just knowing how to look at their website. Because when you're, you're. When you're this close, it's really hard to see the forest for the trees. And it's hard to look at it from a customer or a client point of view. So how. That's really the biggest mindset shift. If you can kind of look at it that way. How can I look at this like a customer would instead of looking at this like a business owner? It's very hard to kind of get far enough back to really get that perspective. So one easy way to audit is actually just to, to ask some people. So go to your friends, you know, family, and those might not be the best options. Maybe a past client, you know, somebody that you have worked with, and just be like, hey, what do you think of my website? And get some feedback from them because they're by definition your ideal client. Right. So you've worked for them, you've done done some work for them, and then they can give you some honest feedback on the website. Might be a little hard to take at first, especially, you know, if it was something that you did yourself or that type of thing, but just being humble and just being willing to listen to some feedback, there's. There's really several different things that I like to focus on though, as far as how to audit your website. And I think we'll talk a little bit more about a tool that we have to help you do this. But really one of the first things is your first impression, and we call the two second test. So studies have shown they do heat maps where they actually track people's eyes and then bounce rates is how long somebody stays on the website before they bounce. So when somebody lands on the website, based on all the studies they've done and stuff, they determine you have about two seconds to grab somebody's attention and get them hooked, to scroll down past the main section, the above the fold section, two seconds or else they're gone. So if you are coming onto your website and maybe your text is hard to read, maybe it's too small, maybe what it says doesn't really apply to what you do, then that's really a very easy win that you can do, is just look at that two seconds.