Life-Changing Books Podcast Episode 73. Wayne Mullins: Author of Full Circle Marketing

Wayne, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you doing today?

I'm great, Nick. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited about this chat.

I am too. So for those in the Book Thinkers audience that are not familiar with you or your business or your book, could you introduce yourself to everybody?

Sure. So I'm Wayne. I am the founder of a bit of a unique marketing company, Ugly Mug Marketing.

It's the best name.

Coming up, coming up soon, we will be celebrating our 13th year in business. And, you know, my background in marketing actually goes back a little bit longer than that to some previous companies, but it's been, it's been an adventure to say the least.

Well, tell me about those early days. So you were, you were involved in like the household maintenance or lawn industry, right? If you go back to some of those early days of entrepreneurship and marketing.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So my background's actually in sales. So went into sales and decided at some point when I actually got good at sales that I wanted to go do something for myself, but didn't have any other skills really other than cutting grass. So left my corporate sales job, started a lawn and landscape company from scratch. And over the course of a 3-year period, grew that from startup to we were one of the 2 largest in our region. It's not a huge region. We're kind of rural communities, but it was still a very sizable company. I sold that company. And during the course of that growth and during the course of selling that company, a lot of our actual customers, lawn care customers, started coming to me saying, hey, how are you growing? How are you scaling? Can you help us do the same? And so, Nick, it was out of these just casual conversations with our clients at the time that the idea for a marketing company or marketing consulting kind of began.

And what are some of the services that Ugly Mug provides?

We primarily focus in kind of 3 core buckets, if you will. The first is web development. So we build custom websites. The next is social media marketing. Our strength there is really in Facebook, Instagram. We've run literally tens of thousands of campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. We do some LinkedIn stuff. We also do a little bit of TikTok. We're starting to experiment there, some YouTube stuff as well. But our core strengths at this point are in Facebook and Instagram. And then our other department is just traditional marketing, everything from radio, television, print, you name it, we do it.

Well, I've made a couple jokes about it before, but I am serious when I say that Your team's website design skills are much better than mine. And so Book Thinkers needs some— we need a little bit of help with our website. So we'll be in touch soon with that. And going back to your time cutting grass, I mean, it was real grassroots, I guess, pun intended, and it turned into a different style of business. And now you've become an expert in the world of marketing. You've decided to write this book, Full Circle Marketing. So could you tell everybody a little bit about When did you decide to write the book? Why did you decide to write the book? And maybe who the target audience is? I know that's 3 questions all sort of rolled up into one, but—

Yeah, I'll forget the other 2, but I'll start with one. So the idea for the book actually began when I had the lawn and landscape company. Now, at the time, I didn't think, oh, this is a great book topic, but it really, the core of the book stems from this philosophy around the definition or the way we like to define marketing. And so, you know, Nick, I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they confuse marketing with advertising. They believe they're one and the same. And in reality, advertising is merely a piece or a component of marketing. And so the way we love to define marketing is this: marketing is your ability to attract and then to keep that customer. Now, when we say keep a customer, we're We don't just simply mean keep the customer. We mean take the customer and transform them into an evangelist for your product, your service, or your brand. And so that was a lot of what we were actually doing in the lawn and landscape company. We were taking very contrarian, very different approaches to our marketing. But once we had a customer, we made sure to turn those customers into evangelists. for our company. And what's interesting is we actually did the same thing with prospects. So we would actually turn prospects who weren't customers, we would turn them into evangelists for our company, even before they ever wrote us a check or hired us to do any work.

I love that. I've got a bunch of questions and things to unpack out of that, which we'll go through throughout today's show. But kind of starting from the top, I— one thing that I recognize about you is that You're sort of against the standard marketing guru type of stuff, right? What's hot today. And you go back to the fundamentals, the things that have been working for a long period of time. So why did you, why did you take that stance? And at what point in your journey did you say, hey, the tried and true stuff works a lot better than the trendy stuff?

Yeah, so the tried and true delivers results. The new flashy stuff there's a lot of smoke and mirrors that takes place. There's a lot of hype that gets built around these things, how to get 100,000 followers, a million followers in the next 30 days or whatever these things are. And don't get me wrong that the people who teach these things, they often base the core of what they're teaching on some fundamentals, but then they blow it up with all this hype stuff around it. And they lure people in, if you will, to their funnels or into their marketing itself with a lot of the hype. And so the true fundamentals, even though they're probably there, they get overlooked because they've hyped it up so much. And so for me, the way we work as a marketing company is this. If you were to come to us and say, hey, Wayne, we want to work with you. We want you to market for us. This is what we say. We say, okay, great. We evaluate the business. We kind of understand your goals. And then we say, look, we only ask you to commit to us for 2 months. Within 2 months, Nick, if you're not happy with the results that we're getting for you, we don't want your money. We want you to go somewhere else. We want you to find someone who can get the results that you're after. And so that mentality, that philosophy forces us to strip away everything that doesn't matter. We are forced to only focus on what's going to get results and not results in 6 months or 12 months or 24 months, but results soon. And let me just speak to one more thing. When I say the word results, for most of the clients that we work with, that means money in the bank account. That means profit, right? And so that holds us to not caring. Like, we don't care about what the latest fad is. We don't care about what the latest trend is. We don't care if, you know, quote unquote TikTok or whatever's the latest thing. What we care about is figuring out How do we actually drive sales? How do we actually drive revenue for this client? So that's why I'm so passionate about stripping away the fluff, stripping away all the hype, and really focusing on what's going to drive sales, what's going to put money in the bank account at the end of the day.

I think you've sort of answered this question already, but going back to one of my original questions in that 3-part question was, who is the target target reader for this book? Is it a business owner who's looking to improve marketing or is it a little bit more broad?

Yeah. So the answer is both. I think it's great for a business owner because I personally believe, I'm a quote-unquote business owner, if you will, but I believe that every entrepreneur, every business owner, at the end of the day, part of their responsibility is driving sales for the organization, driving revenue. So it's of that chief marketing officer as well. So until you have a chief marketing officer in your company, you are the chief marketing officer. You represent the brand. You carry the brand into the marketplace. It's your responsibility. So yes, the book is for that person, but the book is also for anyone that's interested in marketing, anyone that touches marketing. So as a business owner, I could take the book and hand it to someone and say, go through the book. I want you to then put together based on this, the strategy that we're going to follow. And it's hopefully written in such a way, I believe it is written in such a way that anyone, regardless of experience, could pick it up, understand what's there, and then build a strategy on top of that.

It is. I mean, as somebody who's read it twice now, I think that it is built in a way that you can implement and build a strategy immediately. Let's see, it's not too many pages, so it's pretty digestible. What is it? We've got about 115, 120 pages. And so it's actionable. It won't take too much time and there's not a lot of fluff in there, like you said. So I like all of that. Now we'll kind of jump into some of the content, give everybody a preview of what they can actually learn in the book. You decide to start off the book with the line, quote, people assume marketing has to be expensive, complex, and complicated. They're wrong. Why'd you decide to start off the book that way? And sort of what do you mean by that?

Yeah, that stems from the conversation we have with every single new client who comes in our door. They are so frustrated by the fact of, you know, there's a new social media platform every other weekend, there's a different ad rep knocking on their door every single day. And so it's all this confusion about what is actually going to produce the highest and the best ROI for my, for my dollar, for my ad spend. And What happens, I believe, is that because of all of the options available, by default, we fall into this tactical approach. So we begin pulling individual tactics, we throw them in a bag, and we say, this is our marketing strategy. We shake it up a bit. So we may pull something out, throw something else in, we shake it up a bit, and we hope and pray for better results. But at the end of the day, those pieces and components, while there's nothing wrong with any individual one of those without an overarching or an underlying strategy. It's just a bunch of tactics thrown together. One of the best analogies I love to share when I'm sharing with the client about this is I say this, Nick, okay, so let's say that you and I decide we're going to build the world's absolute best car. So that's the goal. The goal is we're going to build the world's best car. And so what we do is we sit down and we say, okay, we're going to start analyzing what makes a great car. And so as we're looking, we say, okay, you know what? Volvo makes an incredible frame for their cars. Always 5-star ratings. They're extremely safe. So we're going to use the Volvo frame. And then we look around and we say, you know what? Rolls-Royce, extreme quiet inside the cab. I don't know what they do, but it's so quiet in that cab. So we're going to take the Rolls-Royce cab. The Volvo frame. And then we keep going. We say, okay, what's next? The engine. Well, we want, you know, you name it. We want a Lamborghini engine because it's amazing. And then we get a transmission from a Mercedes because it's so smooth. We get, you know, all these pieces. And then what do we end up with? We don't actually end up with the world's best car. We end up with a Frankenstein, right? This thing that doesn't really work because none of the pieces and components were designed to go together. And that is exactly what most marketers do. They're looking at, and again, not to pick on a Gary Vee or whoever, but they're saying, okay, Gary's talking about this thing. We've got to be doing this thing. They grab it, throw it in the bag. Well, they hear somebody else talking about the power of video. So they're like, we're going to start doing video. We throw it in the bag. And we believe because we're picking and choosing all of the best pieces and components that we're building this incredible thing. But in reality, we end up with this confusing mess that doesn't produce results, and therefore we're frustrated.

Yeah, I can, I can relate to it actually, because I think I told you before, but I actually have a degree that's focused in marketing. It's business administration with a focus in marketing. And over the course of 4 years in college, I took a dozen classes in marketing and they all seem unrelated. They weren't integrated together. And so I had a tough time applying much of what I was learning. I get a lot more information out of books like this than I do in a 4-year degree that costs 1,000 times as much as your book does. So it's pretty interesting. And that's why I love the power of these books because you can be introduced to the simplicity of what you're trying to teach as opposed to the chaos that exists out there if you just Google marketing advice, right? So I love what your business does.

That's exactly right. And I touch on this a little bit in the book, but we are also very prone to complexity bias. So we tend to naturally believe that the more complex something is, right? So when we think about marketing, the more complex the strategy sounds, the more effective it's going to be. And the reality is it's often the opposite of that, right? The simpler things are, the better the results they produce. And so, you know, for me, same thing. I have a business degree with specialization in marketing, and there was all this complexity around it. There's all these individual pieces and components, but there was never this, you know, at the end of the day, what is marketing really? Marketing is just simply your ability to attract and then turn those people into evangelists if you can for your product or service.

Well, is there anything as simple to prove your point as a marketing rock, right? That's something that you introduced to the reader in chapter 1. So can you tell everybody a little bit about that? If, if somebody is listening to this point, they say marketing really can't be that simple. It really can't be that effective and easy to implement. Here comes the rock that proves your point.

Yeah, absolutely. So the marketing rock is an actual rock. So if you think of a rock that you would get to skip across a lake, so it's kind of smooth and it's flat and it's a decent size around, we actually take these rocks and we write on these rocks, effective marketing doesn't have to be expensive. And then we put our web address on there. And so we would go around and leave these in restaurants on tables. We'd leave them in hotel lobbies. coffee shops, anywhere that our target client or customer may be. So that's an important point. We didn't just go to random places and leave these things. We would go to places where our clientele would be. Another example would be a golf course. Leave them in the golf cart after you play a round of golf or leave them in the clubhouse. And the simplicity of that message, you see, we understand that our customer, our ideal customer, they're frustrated With marketing. When they come to us, we know that they're frustrated. They believe that it's expensive, that it's complicated. So this little simple idea of effective marketing doesn't have to be expensive— they get this rock, and the simplicity of that rock and the message on that rock drives home the fact that they're doing all these other things. They've got all this complexity, all this expense around marketing. And yet this one little rock has now impacted them in such a way that even to this day, I still have people bring me rocks or mention rocks in the conversations with us. I remember seeing your rock at this place. And so literally, you know, you go down to the garden store, you spend $10 on some rocks, you get a Sharpie and write on there. That one marketing campaign for us has generated more than $1 million in revenue. Since we've started using that. And again, the reason is because it's not just about attracting those people, right? So the people who come to us through that, that connection point, but it's taking those people and then turning them into evangelists for our company.

Yeah, that's a great representation of what you said. You're turning a prospect who hasn't even purchased anything yet into an evangelist telling all their friends and family about your great marketing tools before they've even decided to work with you. So I think that's a That's a great sort of full circle representation of what you're talking about. Now, in chapter 2, as you already mentioned, you define marketing as your ability to attract and keep a customer. And what I thought you did a great job at highlighting there was the fact that it's not just about grabbing somebody's attention at first, it's about keeping them as a customer. And as somebody who has worked in the sales and marketing space for so long, I really think we neglect the second half of that relationship. So what are some of the tactics that you can use to keep somebody as a customer?

Sure. I think it's important, first of all, Nick, to understand that— and I'm speaking to myself, so I'm putting myself in this category— we as entrepreneurs are often very delusional about the quality of service or product that we provide. So Bain& Company, a huge research company, they went out and they surveyed just under 4,000 small businesses across the United States. And they said to the owners of these companies, they said, how would you rate yourself in terms of the level of service you provide to your customers? Option 1, superior service. Option 2 is good service. 3 is average. 4 is terrible service. And 80% of those entrepreneurs said that they provide superior service. So think about that. 4,000 businesses almost across the country, 80% of them, the owners of those companies said that they believe they provide superior service. So Bain& Company, being a smart research company they are, said something's not right here. Like how in the world are 80% of these companies providing superior service? So they went back to those same companies and got permission to actually survey the customers from those companies. And so when they did that, the results came back in. And what they discovered was that only 8% of the customers of those companies reported that those companies provided superior service. So on the one hand, we have the companies who say, yes, we believe we're providing superior service. And on the flip side, their customers, only a small portion of them actually believe that. And so number one, for us as entrepreneurs, we have to be transparent. We have to be honest with ourselves. We need to It's our baby, right? We love our product, our service, but sometimes we need to say our baby's ugly, right? We have to be, we have to be brutally honest. And so we have to be sure that we are indeed meeting expectations. So if you're not meeting expectations, right, with your product or service, there's zero chance of turning that person into an evangelist for your organization. So that's step 1. To get there.

Yeah. Let me, let me ask you a question. So business owners listening to today's conversation and they go, well, I'm part of that 80%. How do they test and measure customer satisfaction? Is it through some type of like NPS survey or how does that happen?

Yeah. So there's lots of ways to do it. The one you just mentioned, Net Promoter Score, is a great option to do that. One of the ways we love to have clients do this, because it's more of an internal audit process, is we say take out a sheet of paper, And down the left-hand side of the sheet of paper, we want you to write down every point of contact that someone's going to have as they move through your buying and selling cycle, right? So as they go through purchasing your product or service, what are all the points of interaction, the point of connection? And so let's just say point number 1 is they visit the website. Okay. Point number 2 is they pick up the phone and call. Point number 3 is, you know, the order gets taking over the phone. The next one is the product arrives, whatever it may be. You go down the list, you list out every single point of detail, and then you're going to draw 2 lines down the page. You're going to create 3, 3 columns out to the side of this. And in the middle, you're going to write down what does a reasonable person— right, because there are some unreasonable people— but what does a reasonable customer have the right to expect during this part of the process? So when they go to our website, what do they have the right to expect? They have the right to expect our page is going to load within 5 seconds? They have the right to expect that our website's going to be up and functional? They have the right to expect that all the pages and links are going to work correctly? Then we move down to the phone. Okay, when they pick up the phone to call, because maybe our, our process is more complicated or complex, so they've got to call to place the order, when they call, what do they have the right to expect? Do they expect the phone to ring 10 times, 5 times, 3 times? What do they have the right to expect? Then we move down. When we ship the product, what do they have the right to expect? Does it take 2 days? Does it take 1 day? Does it take a week? What's realistic? So we go down every single one, and then we come back and we say, okay, now what does it actually take to exceed that? So if they go to the website and it loads in 5 seconds, and we know that's what they expect, can we get it down to 2? When they pick up the phone and call, if they expect us to answer within 3 rings, can we answer within 2 rings? Right? So we go down the list. And then the final step, and this is the most important one, and this is the one that most entrepreneurs by this point, they're like, I don't need to do that. I get it. But you have to go back and say, what does it actually look like when we don't hit expectations? So we go back through the same process. So they come to the website. If it takes 10 seconds, 7 seconds, that's not meeting expectations. If we don't answer in 5 rings, if it's 7 rings, 8 rings, whatever, we're not meeting. So now what you have is you actually have A litmus test. You can hire a secret shopper and say, we want you to go through and we want you to order our product or service. We want you to determine, tell us where we fall on the spectrum. Did we answer the phone within 3 rings? Yes or no. Did the website load within 5 seconds? Yes or no. Did the product arrive? So what we're doing is we're actually evaluating through fresh eyes. We're evaluating the experience not from what we believe to be true, but from what is actually happening. So, that's a great little exercise. Every single time we lead somebody through that, they always walk away with ahas and realizations of where they're dropping the ball and where they're weak.

I think the last couple of minutes of what you just said, I think that's gold. I think that's worth its weight in gold for sure. Because as I think about going through that process, which I haven't done yet, but as I think about going through that process, there's so many areas of my process that need to be audited. That need to be improved, and it reminds me of of the AIDA. Am I pronouncing that correctly? I know we kind of joked about that before. Is it AIDA?

Yeah, I don't know.

AIDA framework that that you talk about in chapter three and that fourth pillar action, which we'll get to in a minute. But let's go through each one of those. So what is AIDA? And then let's cover each one of those individually.

Sure, AIDA is actually a marketing framework or marketing concept that was first talked about. In the early 1900s. So over 100 years ago.

Yeah.

That's when it was talked about. So it's a simple framework that no matter what type of marketing you're doing, this framework can be applied. So each one just stands for different things. So I'm going to just quickly run through them. Then we can come back and dive in however much you want to. But the first A is attention. And I like to say where attention goes, money flows. Where attention goes, money flows. So we first have to capture someone's attention with whatever it is that we're doing. The next letter is D— I'm sorry, I, and that is interest. So once we capture their interest— attention, we have to then speak to their interest. What are they interested in? And an important point here, Nick, is that people are not interested in our product or service. They are interested in their interests. So, if we make, for example, golf clubs, they're not necessarily interested in our golf clubs, even though we may have the coolest brand, the newest brand, the best driver, whatever it may be. What they're interested in is a lower score, a further drive. And so, we have to be very careful when we're communicating with prospects or even with clients that we're speaking to the true Interest, their interest, not our product or service, not about our product or service. The next letter in that is desire. And so we want to, through our messaging, we want to evoke desire. We want them to see a different possibility. We want them to desire a different outcome. We want them to desire driving the ball further down the fairway, right? To get rid of the slice, to get rid of the hook, whatever it may be. We want to evoke that possible future, that, that different future that's available to them. And then the last one, and as simple as this one is, it's the one that so many people overlook, and that is action. So once we've captured their attention, we've spoken to their true interest, we've risen, you know, gotten their desire to rise up there. They're desiring this thing now. We have to give them a clear call to action, a very specific, what's the next step that they should take to move forward with us?

Maybe a fun example for everybody listening today would be to kind of walk through my Instagram funnel for working with authors through each one of these lenses. So, if we start with attention, where attention goes, money flows, I think that that's pretty simple. It's just The more traction that I can get on Instagram, the more eyes are going to be on the post, the more authors are going to want to work with me to help promote their books, right? But then the interest piece is where I think it starts to get really interesting, I guess, pun intended again. So you said that people are interested in their interests, not your product or services. Their interest, if they're an author wanting to promote their book, is selling more books, not an aesthetically pleasing picture on my Instagram, right? So my marketing needs to be geared towards helping somebody get more exposure or selling more books, not just a pretty Instagram picture, although that's important for the attention piece to keep everybody engaged. And then we go to desire. So desire starts with the knowledge that something better is possible. If somebody's using a traditional form of advertising and they're not getting a lot of eyes and they can go, oh, 30,000 people can see this picture on Instagram or something like that, That starts to show them that something better is possible. And then the call to action, I guess for me in my Instagram bio, it says DM for book promotions or something. I could probably improve that a little bit. So yeah. So does that all make sense?

You mind if I kind of— yeah, absolutely. Do you mind if I kind of riff off of that?

No, I don't mind.

And dive in a little bit deeper. So let's go back to attention. So by default, you get attention on your page. So authors may stumble across you find your page. But the other aspect, when we actually shift your thinking into, okay, if you were going to go after, go find potential authors, right? And capture their attention, what are the ways and what are the areas that you could go to, to show up to help capture their attention? So again, I'm just off the cuff, but maybe there are certain— I think you just actually recently promoted a book. that somebody teaches other people how to write books. Is that right?

Yeah, I did. It was today.

Yeah. So maybe you could look for people like that who are connected with authors, right? So you could show up in meaningful ways to those communities, those groups, right? So right now you're showing up to the broad picture of people who love books, people who— authors, et cetera. But if you begin showing up in those sub-communities of people who teach other people how to write books, position yourself as the person to help them, right? You're in that. And so when you then move into the interest and what's interesting, or what am I interested in as an author, book sales are the obvious, but— and you alluded to this— but there are other things that authors are interested in. So speaking engagements or inquiries about speaking engagements, publicity, right? So having other media pick up the book, talk about the book. So it's kind of that domino effect. So when you then begin speaking to prospective authors, you speak in terms of those things. So maybe work on getting some stats around, did you know that— I'm making up numbers here— but did you know that 4 out of every 10 people who promote on our page end up getting a paid speaking engagement within 90 days? Or did you know that every author that's featured on our page gets picked up by a news media outlet 37% of the time. Again, I'm making up numbers here, but again, you're shifting that to the interest of the author itself outside of the obvious interest, which is more book sales.

No, I really like that.

Yeah. And then desire, you know, it's just clearly painting that picture of Hey, hey, Nick, imagine what it would be like if, you know, 2 weeks after we made the post on your page, you got 3 inquiries about your speaking services. Or imagine what it would be like if, you know, we then distributed this as a press release and you got 2 people interested in writing an article about the book you just published. So again, you're evoking that future state. You're helping me see what the future could look like.

I really like that. And then, yeah, that, that piece of the action, you know, I kind of highlighted in my notes for questions here, the goal of your marketing should be to make selling unnecessary. So if you're so good at providing value upfront throughout that entire process, then the call to action almost becomes automatic, right?

Yeah. And the big thing, the big, big thing, Nick, is this, that when people— so by the time people work through all the other stuff, when it gets time to do the call to action, they just assume that people are going to do the thing, whatever that is, right? So whether it's DM you or whatever. And so they don't even tell people what to do next. So it's just important to say, hey, if you're interested in working with us, DM me. If you're interested with us, pick up the phone or send an email, whatever it may be. But I can't tell you the number of times that people do all this other work, they get the messaging just right, they get the promotion just right, but then they don't tell people what to do. They just assume people are going to figure out what to do next. So don't make that mistake. I'm not saying you are. I'm saying for those listening, don't make that mistake.

Well, no, I mean, I still make a lot of mistakes in my marketing, and that's one of the most valuable aspects of this podcast for me is that I get an opportunity to speak with experts like you and get a little bit of personal mentoring, which is why I'm always vulnerable and open to recommendations. Because when I'm thinking about that workflow in the way that you just described it, I mean, even at the bottom of every Instagram post that I put out there, there's no call to action, right? Other than maybe for somebody to engage and ask a question. But I could put something like, if you're interested in promoting your book or you have a friend that's interested in promoting their book, please send us a DM or something like that. So I could definitely—

That's exactly right.

Could definitely be improving it a little bit. In chapter 5, you said something that I repeat to a lot of people, and I'm just going to read the quote here. You said that strategic marketing is about holding each dollar accountable for a specific result. And so I picture a lot of people just sort of throwing their dollars into the wind and hoping they land in the right place, but they're out there cutting coupons at the grocery store to save 10 cents. So why can marketing be predictable and sort of what are some of the aspects of predictable marketing?

Yeah, that really starts diving into what I outline in the book as the natural progression. And I know we're running low on time here, so I'm not going to dive into the whole progression, but the book goes into detail. But the general sense is that out there in the world, there are strangers who you believe would be a good fit for your product or service. Then there's another group called friends. So those people know about you. They like you a little bit. In other words, there's slight interest in whatever it is that you provide. Then below that, we have customers. The difference between the friend group and the customer group is that they know about you, they like you, and they now trust that your product, your service is going to deliver. It's going to be of more value to them than the dollars they're going to hand over. And so those are the 3 first steps. And that is where 99% of marketing dollars go. It goes on that side of the equation of companies, individuals trying to convince strangers to know about us, strangers to like us, than those people who do know about us and like us to actually trust us enough to pull out their wallets and hand us money. The whole other side of that equation is once we have a customer, we then can turn them into evangelists if we're intentional. Right? And the beauty about turning people into evangelists for our product or service is that once they're an evangelist, it bypasses the entire stranger portion of the world because they're going and telling their friends, their family, And they're imparting some of their trust and some of their liking or loving of our product and service to their friends and family. And so question number one I would ask people just to think about is what percentage of your marketing budget goes to attracting customers and what percent goes to keeping or converting customers into evangelists? And I already know the answer. It's the vast majority goes to the attracting side. So I would challenge people listening, shift your mentality. We live in a world where every single human being with a device they carry around their pocket or purse is now the— they have the power to broadcast messages to the world. Right? So through their phones, they can broadcast messages to the world through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it, the platform. And the question simply becomes, what are we doing to encourage people to go out and share in positive ways? Are we creating remarkable moments, remarkable experiences? Do our customers, do our clients love us so much that they're willing to go out and share, whether that's publicly through a device, social media, et cetera, or when they sit down and meet with somebody. And so when we understand kind of the natural progression, we're very— it's easy for us to then hold every dollar accountable, which goes back to your question. Because we can say, okay, for this set of dollars, I'm allocating it to the attraction side. For this set of dollars, I'm allocating it to the keeping or converting side. If And then within that, I can say, okay, within the attraction side, we're allocating this percent to move people from strangers to friends. And so once I have that allocation, I can say, okay, let's check and see how— what do the results actually look like, right? How productive were those dollars? Did they move people? Did they reach enough people to get them to know about us and to like us? And then the next one, moving them from, you know, a friend into a customer. We can hold that set of dollars accountable for the campaigns that fall within that. And, you know, if you really think about it, Nick, there's really, you know, 3 or 4 campaigns is all you really need. Core types of campaigns: you need one campaign to get people to know about you, you need a campaign to get people to like you, so build some affinity for your product or service, for your company. The next one's the trust piece, right? You need a campaign around trust, building trust. And then the last one is building the relationship after they make a purchase. And those campaigns on the one side can overlap. They can be one campaign that gets people to know, like, and trust in one. We find the more you split those out though, the more you can hold every single dollar accountable. So if I've got a campaign just for getting people to know about us, I can hold it accountable. If I've got one for getting people to like us, hold it accountable, et cetera.

Do you have a golden ratio that you recommend to your clients? You know, on the attraction versus retention, or yeah, the retention side?

I don't. And it's just simply because there's such variety in the type of clients we work with in terms of industry, service-based versus product-based. What I would say is this, that typically service-based businesses should be spending more money on the, on the keeping side. They can afford to spend more on the keeping side because it's much more relational, right? So in our business, it's long-term relationships. So the longer we keep those relationships going, the more we have the chance to create evangelists. On the product, if you have a product that you're selling, you should still be spending more than you are. I promise it's more than you're currently spending on the keeping and converting side. But I don't have a perfect ratio other than if you're a service-based business, the percent should be higher than if you have a product-based business. And across the board, you should be spending more on the keeping and converting side than you are.

Well, I think the book had a lot of great information on evangelizing the world and the concept of evangelists in your business. So for people listening that want to learn a little bit more about that, I would recommend you grab a copy of Full Circle Marketing. Wait, before we wrap up, I had one more concept that I thought was interesting. And it's the concept of a cleaning schedule, because I think a lot of business owners, they throw some money at marketing, it's a recurring relationship, and then they forget about it. And so what's the purpose of this cleaning schedule? Could you just share a little bit about that with everybody?

Yeah, I think, um, you know, as people move through your, your sales funnel or through your process, I think it's so important that we look for obstacles that are popping up in people's path. We look for debris that's on the road. I'll give you an example. This past weekend, I went to go pick up some Chinese food for dinner. And I go up to the window to pay and I pull out the card I had with me. It was an American Express. And the lady there says, sorry, we don't take American Express. So that's an obstacle, right? Here I am with an American Express card trying to pay for my food. and you don't take it. Now, did I have something else I could pay with? Yes. But imagine in the business world, a lot of people carry American Express. So what amount of money are they losing with that one little obstacle because they don't want to pay a percentage higher? So it's 3% versus 2.2% on the credit card processing. That's an example of a foolish obstacle that's in the path. Or Another example would be not accepting credit cards. Another example may be, one for us that was, I don't know, I would call it more debris. We work with clients all across the country and we actually have clients occasionally from around the world. And we're in Central Time Zone, which means when we're done at the end of the day, 5 o'clock, people in California are just at 3 o'clock. And so we added live answering service, so our phones are answered live with a live human being 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We also added live human chat support on our website. So again, we're— what we're looking for, we're looking to remove any obstacle or debris that prevents someone from doing business with us. And so I think that's why it's so important to do this kind of self-audit and make sure that the path is as clean And as easy as possible for people to hand us money.

I love it. I love it. Funny enough, I ran into an online service while I was doing my Christmas shopping that didn't accept American Express. So I understand exactly about the— exactly what you're saying in the debris situation there. They need to clean that up. So for those that want to learn a little bit more about you, or they're interested in the book, they want to learn more about the book, where should they go? What should they do?

Yep. So for the book, you can go to yourfullcirclemarketing.com, or it's available on all the, all the major book retailers as well. For me, you can just go to uglymugmarketing.com, and there you'll find all my info. We've got links to social channels and all that kind of stuff.

And, and the very final thing is tell everybody a little bit about the Business Growth Summit that you host, and maybe they'll want to attend in the future.

Yeah, rumor has it that we had, uh, someone from your organization there speaking, and, uh, we had great feedback. Actually, Nick was there. He was one of the speakers. Um, had great feedback on what Nick shared. He shared on kind of building a tribe online. Um, it's a summit that we typically do every couple of years. We bring in speakers from all over the country. Uh, it's a small event. Nick can, can testify that we're in a very small region, small town. But our goal is just simply this. We want to bring the absolute best minds in different fields together to serve our community, to serve our audience here, and give them the same access that entrepreneurs, business owners in bigger cities would have. And so that's our goal. That's our intention with it.

Well, I can testify that it was a lot of fun. It was very professional, and your team did a very good job at hosting the event and facilitating all of the speakers and everything. So A+ from me. And so what I'll do is I'll toss the link that you mentioned for your book and the link that you mentioned for your website and for you down in the show notes. And with that, it's the end of our show. So thank you so much, Wayne.

Thanks, Nick. I appreciate it.