The Easy Marketing Guide For Trades Businesses w/ Wayne Mullins

Now, we often know that it's important. We know that we should be doing marketing things. What happens is, you know, if you're the founder, the entrepreneur, the owner, you've got so many different things you're trying to juggle and keep going at any point in time that the marketing piece kind of falls by the wayside. The absolute best thing you can do is put an hour or two on your calendar each day to merely ponder how you can better serve your customers. Because that one exercise re-centers you. It refocuses you on really why you exist. If you serve your customers better than your competitors are serving customers, you're gonna win. It's a long game, but you're gonna win. So instead of trying to better, you know, outdo your competitors, figure out how you can out-serve the customer base. That's the winning ticket. And although it doesn't sound like marketing, It's a huge part of marketing.

This is the Field Rocket Podcast. I'm your host, Tullik Priest, and today we're joined by Wayne Mullins from Ugly Mug Marketing. Welcome to the show, Wayne.

Thank you, Tullik. I'm excited for our chat today.

Yeah, well, it's great to have you here. Could you tell us a little bit about what your company does and what your role is?

Sure. So I am the founder. I started the company just over 15 years ago and we are a full-service marketing agency. So everything from digital, all the various social platforms, to very, very traditional marketing from direct mail, television, radio, print. So we cover all the bases depending on exactly what the client's goals are and what they're trying to accomplish.

And you do a done-for service. So if there was a heating and plumbing company or a trade company coming to you, you would handle all of the marketing, is that correct?

That is correct. We, we operate kind of in 3 buckets. So we done— do done for you. We also have some done with you where we come alongside guide people and do some portions of it, but also educate them on the other things they could or should be doing and kind of guide them through that process. And then we do a lot of just educational things where we basically teach people how to go out and do it for themselves. So, you know, we host a lot of events, do a lot of kind of free training programs, things like that, just to really help entrepreneurs figure out how to do this thing that's often viewed as very complex. Which is marketing. How do they do that and make it work for them and keep it simple?

Well, marketing can be like, it can be a bit of a black box. You know, you don't really, sometimes it's hard to track or it takes quite a bit of effort together. So you don't really know what's actually going to work and it does take actually some time to set up. What would be your kind of recommendations like for somebody who's just kind of, they've got a successful business, but they just kind of want to grow it like a trade business, like home services.

Yeah, I think one of the great foundational pieces to start with is what's called the marketing triangle. So if you just think of a pyramid or a triangle, there's 3 points on that triangle. And what often happens when we're in the middle of growing a business, regardless of the stage that we're in, what happens is, you know, if you're the founder, the entrepreneur, the owner, you've got so many different things you're trying to juggle and keep going at any point in time that the marketing piece kind of falls by the wayside. Now, we often know that it's important. We know that we should be doing marketing things. And so we want to give some time and attention to that, and we allocate and we dedicate some resources to it. But what happens is we often end up playing this game where we're jumping from, you know, platform to platform or from media to media, you know, kind of a language we'd use here in the States would be throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, right? We're just trying a bunch of different things to see what's going to work. And what I can tell you is, first of all, that's not strategic, that's not going to work. So we believe with the Marketing Triangle, you have to start with clearly understanding your market first. So that is the foundational thing. And What happens is over time, we get so enamored with the pieces and the components and all the operational sides of our business that we begin to lose sight of the core problems that we solve for our market. And so one of the best places for someone to start is to go back to that. I think it was Earl Nightingale, an author, speaker. I think he's been passed away now for probably 20 or 30 years, but He used to say, if your business is struggling and you want to drastically transform your business, the absolute best thing you can do is put an hour or two on your calendar each day to merely ponder how you can better serve your customers. Because that one exercise re-centers you, it refocuses you on really why you exist. So you start there, you start with the market, you then move into the message. So you start with the peak, The market's at the peak. You then move into the message. Once you clearly understand the needs, the desires, the wants, the wishes, you know, all of those things about your market, you can then speak in a way that cuts through the noise immediately and resonates with who they are, where they are, and the problems they're facing. And then based on those two things, the market, the message that you've now crafted, you can then select the media based on where your market is. And where your message is going to fit.

I'll just stop you, sir, for a second, because you're covering quite a lot in a very, very basic time, and it is kind of— so just kind of sort of just backtracking slightly. So you've got to know your customer, and then you've actually got to know what their pains are, and then you need to describe those pains better than they can themselves. Is that correct?

That is spot on. So let me just add to that a little bit. So most people have probably heard of creating like a customer avatar. That is where you create a fictitious character who embodies or represents your ideal customer. So, you know, their demographic information, you know, their economic or socioeconomic information, you know, the TV shows they watch, all of this stuff, you, you build that out, but we believe in taking that a step further. And we call this the magic journal exercise. Imagine your customer wakes up in the morning, they're wiping the sleep from their eyes, they grab their cup of coffee or cup of tea, they make their way over to their desk or their table, they pull out their journal to journal for the morning. And the journal page is already filled out, the date is there, there's words on the page, and they're trying to figure out what's going on here. They wipe the sleep from their eyes and they're like, am I dreaming? What's going on? And they read this. And someone has written in vivid detail all of their pains, all of their frustrations, all of the things they're excited about, the problems with the family, the exciting things taking place with the kids. That is how in-depth and in tune you need to be with your market.

Okay, because this kind of— in the past, I have actually done, you know, like an avatar, and there is kind of a, you know, that's fine, you kind of say it's this demographic, this is where they go, this is it, but it's actually quite difficult to take that and actually put it into practice, or to actually have it in such a way that you can actually build a list out of it. Like, for— in the US it's called home services. In the UK, you're servicing like trades, so you're servicing domestic properties. So it— like, for example, for heating and plumbing companies, like HVAC in the US, is every household has a gas boiler And so how would you actually narrow that down to like a persona? Because everyone has a house and pretty much everyone has a boiler. Like, what could you actually add to this persona?

Yeah, so I think it's important, um, first of all, to understand who you best serve, right? So out of that, out of that mix, are you serving large homes? Are you serving commercial? Are you serving only residential? Are you doing a hybrid of those things? Are you doing people with, you know, up to— I think I'm gonna use different terms there slightly— up to, you know, 1,500 square feet, up to 3,000 square feet? Like, what is your sweet spot? Who do you target? The next thing would be the type of person that you best are suited to serve. So some people are going to be more quote-unquote demanding. In other words, they're going to expect faster service. They're going to expect you to be there within a few hours, not a few days. So again, that's gonna be based on who you are able to serve based on the structure of your business, based on the size of your company. So getting crystal clear about those elements matters a lot as well.

Okay. Because I think in the U— I'm kind of putting you on the spot slightly because you don't know the UK, but you know, the engineers, like you can only travel so far, you know, because you would So you have, you know, where you actually live, it controls a little bit. But as you kind of the point, some people want a faster service that would be more high-end and you would, you'd be charging more for those services. So you would need to look at your local environment, look at, is it more commercial there? Is there more domestic? Is it going to be more servicing, et cetera? So once you've kind of looked at the market, you know what the frustrations are, how do you actually put it— what I'm trying to do is just put it into like something practical that you can actually do. I don't know whether— do you have like an example or something that you could give?

Yeah, sure. So how do we take this and turn it into messaging?

Turning into messaging and actually make it practical as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So once you get clear about the who, right, your market that you're going to serve, who you are best suited to serve. Um, you're then going to do the two exercises that we just talked about. So one, make sure you have that avatar defined. Um, so, you know, is it, um, both partners are working and so, you know, having scheduling issues or letting them in the house may be an issue? Um, is that an issue? Is that something that you can speak to? In other words, we work after hours, we work early, we work late, we work during lunch breaks so that You don't have to miss work. You don't have to miss important things. But when we begin writing that language, it's important that we speak to those things, like speaking to the fact, if you know that you serve people who both people in the household, if there's two people in the household and they're both, you know, full-time employees somewhere, they're working, then we want to speak to that. We understand that you have a busy schedule. We understand that you're, got kids, that you're running your kids to and from practices or dropping them off at various places and keeping up with all their activities. So you want to use language that doesn't just speak to, if you have a problem with your heating or plumbing, call us. You want to speak in such a way that you're speaking directly to that person. In other words, we know you're busy running around. We know what it's like to have, you know, job, full-time job, plus managing kids, plus all the other things. Here's how we make it simple for you. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. So, you're actually talking about the customer. You're not just saying— your website is not just saying, I do this, this, this, this, call me.

Yeah, that's a huge mistake. Those are platitudes, right? Everyone can use those platitudes. Everyone can say great service, friendly service. Everyone can say you know, X years of experience. The years may vary slightly, but everyone can say those same things. And I see this so often when people come to us, they try to find better platitudes or better words to describe what they do. In other words, your competitor says, we've been in business for 15 years. Well, or we've got 15 years of experience. You hire somebody else with more experience on your team. Now you try to brag, we've got 20 years experience. In the space, or fast turnaround. Well, they try to say the fastest turnaround in town, or, you know what I mean? So trying to one-up the platitudes is a losing game. The game to play to win is being different. Differentiation, that is the game you have to play if you want to win. You can't just simply be better than your competitors. You have to choose to be different.

Okay, and, and this wording is obviously coming back from your just understanding the customer. So actually really understanding your local area, what their needs are, and then actually, you know, writing that in the copy.

Absolutely. The more you can speak to them about them, the more your message is gonna resonate. So instead of speaking about us and what we do, speak to them about them. It's drastically different from what everyone else in the marketplace does. And it cuts through the noise because they hear it. It's like when you're at a party and there's, you know, 50 people in the room. Someone can say your name from across the room and it cuts through the noise. You hear your name being spoken. The same thing happens when you take your marketing messages and you shift away from the general platitudes, the general words that everyone can use, and you begin focusing in on your customer, you speak directly to them. It causes them, like the party scenario, to turn in the midst of all the chaos, in the midst of all the other noise in the marketplace, and it causes your message to immediately stand out.

You're actually about them, not yourself.

Yes, absolutely.

And how do you kind of— like, if you were thinking— we're kind of talking about websites at the moment. I'm kind of thinking a little bit about search engine optimization, basically how to be found. Um, how would you— or what would you kind of recommend as like a, a company name? Would you suggest like the, the main search terms for that area would be, would be the, the domain that you'd go for? Or like, because you get a lot of people's initials and then the word plumbing, you know, what, what would you suggest in these scenarios?

In the perfect world, you would do exactly what you suggested. So you would go to Google and you would start typing in the search terms that someone may search for when they need your services. So heating service or, you know, heating system replacement. I don't know the exact terms, but whatever those terms would be. So as you begin typing in Google, Google auto-populates, right? It tries to guess what you're looking for. So gives you some terms that people have searched for that are similar to what you've searched for. So if you could take one of those search terms and make that your domain. Now, again, the question is, is it available? If it is, that is definitely what you'd want to use because Google views that as favorable. In other words, what people are searching for exactly matches your URL. then you would use that same language throughout your website, right? So you take that same keyword or keyword phrase and you want to use that throughout your website.

Okay, so that would come across naturally to the humans, but also, you know, quite important for them. So this, this would be things like heating and plumbing Birmingham or whatever the term would be.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

And then, so is that kind of covering the 3 points of the triangle? So you've got know your customer, actually do the wording about them, and what was the third part of the triangle?

The third one is where do you go with the message? What media or medium do you use to communicate that message? And this is the place where most people start. Most entrepreneurs start with the media or the medium that they're going to use to broadcast the message. So they look around and they see their competitors are doing a lot on, let's just say, Facebook as an example. And so they say, we've got to be more, you know, consistent on Facebook. We've got to get our messaging out on Facebook. So they start doing a bunch of stuff on Facebook and it doesn't work, right? They don't get engagement. They're not getting business from it. Or maybe they see you know, they see it in print. The competitors are in print, so they think, oh, we've got to be in print. And so they, they turn to print and they start doing print. And again, it goes back to understanding your market. Where are they actually consuming the information? Where are— what shows are they watching? What books are they reading? Where are they shopping? All of those things come into play because what we want to do is we want to, we want to put our message in a place where it has the absolute best chance of being seen and understood by the audience we're wanting to reach.

Okay. If you start with just copying whatever else is without missing out the two other steps, you know, it's just not gonna land correctly. You're just not gonna get the attention. And it might be the wrong channel as well.

Absolutely. Because what happens is most entrepreneurs— and again, we've worked in over 100+ industries, lots of clients— and I can tell you this is fact, that most entrepreneurs, their marketing plan, if you want to call it a plan, stems from looking at what other people are doing in their space and then copying it, but trying to do it slightly better than their competitors are doing it. And so we've ended up with this kind of cesspool, this contaminated marketplace where everyone is just simply doing what everyone else is doing but trying to do it a little bit better than them. And again, it goes back to the customer. It doesn't go back to trying to beat the competitor. If you serve your customers better than your competitors are serving customers, you're going to win. It's a long game, but you're gonna win. So instead of trying to better, you know, outdo your competitors, figure out how you can outserve the customer base. That's the winning ticket. And although it doesn't sound like marketing, it's a huge part of marketing.

So it's just moving that focus from the competitors back to the customers. Keep to the basics. What are their needs? What are their pains? And actually just serve them.

It's— what's fascinating about this is that You know, as a business owner— so I own this agency, um, this agency is like my baby, right? It's like a child. I've poured my life into this. I've invested so many hours into this, so much money into this. This is like my baby. And the truth is, I don't want to call my baby ugly, right? I don't want to admit that my baby has flaws, that it's ugly, that there's things that are broken, that we don't do well, uh, here in the States. There's this large consulting firm called Bain Company. Um, they're actually a global company, but they're based here in the States in Boston. And they went across the U.S. and they surveyed 4,000 small business owners here in the States. And they went to them, they said, look, you know, there's 5 different levels of service that you could be providing to your customers. The, the bottom of that is terrible, right? Just absolutely terrible service. And then it moved all the way up to the top one, which was phenomenal service. So 5 different levels, and each of them have a name, you know, so it's terrible, basic, average, good, and phenomenal. And so they surveyed these 4,000 business owners, and they say to them, which level of service do you provide to your customers? And 81% of these small business owners said, we provide phenomenal service. 81%. Now, first of all, if you study statistics, you know that that is not even possible, right? That, I mean, it's just improbable that that would be true. Um, so Bain and Company says something's not right with these numbers. There's no way that 81% of small business, these 4,000 small businesses, provide that level of service. So they said, we're going to go back to these business owners and we're going to ask them for permission to ask a few of their customers the same question. We know you do business with, for example, in my case, we know you do business with Ugly Mug Marketing. What would you rate them in terms of the service they provide? Same scale, terrible to phenomenal. And taluk, only 8% of the customers said that they provide phenomenal service. So on the one hand, we have business owners who 81% believe they're providing phenomenal service. You flip that around to the customer's perspective, only 8% of those customers agree that they're providing phenomenal service. And so there's this huge disconnect in terms of the level of service that we often believe that we're providing. And at the core, you know, we— when we think about marketing, most people confuse marketing and advertising. They believe that they're one and the same, and they're not. Advertising is, you know, it's the public-facing things. It's the things you do to get your message out. But marketing encompasses so much more. Marketing encompasses the way you actually service your customers.

Did they kind of find out? Because that's, that's just a huge gulf between those points of view. I'm just trying to think of, like, did they kind of look at, you know, why it was so different?

Yeah, I don't know. They drew their conclusions that, um, their conclusions were basically Perception— how our perception is often skewed by what we want to believe to be true. That was kind of their key takeaway. So as, as business owners, what we want to be true is we want to believe that we provide phenomenal service. Again, you, you think about what you pour into a business to grow it. Doesn't matter the industry, um, you know, we want to believe that we're providing exceptional, phenomenal service to our customers. And the sad reality is oftentimes we're falling short of that mark.

Well, you also, I guess there's an element that you also value your own efforts, you know, really highly because you're there, you know, doing the efforts. But it's, yeah, it's just kind of interesting that it's just so different. And for our software company, we actually quiz, we send out a survey. I'm sure you've seen a lot of them that says from 0 to 10, how do you, you know, how much would you recommend, you know, our software or service, etc. So if the actual customers, if they— and we actually get a lot of really good feedback from that. So we get suggestions, and then when we get told we're not actually doing well in a certain area, at least we're aware of it, we can fix it. Um, would you, you know, we would kind of recommend sort of, you know, all companies to do that if they could, just to actually, even if it's not quite so formal, you can just, when you're with customers, or just leave something that where they can actually provide some feedback and anonymously.

Yeah, I think it's interesting to me, oftentimes I find that business owners sometimes don't want to hear the truth. They, they're afraid to hear the criticism, and when they do hear the criticism, they often get defensive. Oh well, you caught us on a bad day, or oh well, you know, that person, you know, is no longer here, or they get defensive. So again, what I would encourage people listening to think about is that marketing, again, is not just about the pieces that you're putting out to the public to get people to call you or get people to to use your services. It's everything because we live in a world today where 6.7 billion people have a device called a smartphone. That means 6.7 billion people have the ability in an instant to tell the world about our product or service in an instant. And yet as entrepreneurs, as marketers, We don't understand the power of that. We don't understand how do we actually leverage that ability to turn our customers into what we call evangelists, right? Someone who's willing to go out and tell their friends and family about us. So that, that again, the way we service the customers, the way we show up, the way we follow up, that is marketing. That is marketing, and it matters more today than ever before.

We did a, um, a kind of a survey of all the— you know, we've got, um, it's getting close to 6,000 companies that use our software at the moment. And, um, we did a kind of a, an analysis just kind of looking at which were the most successful companies. And the most successful companies, uh, it wasn't a great surprise, but it was the ones that have slightly over 90% of recurring work. Um, so it's, it will depend in which stage your business is in. Like if you're in just starting, you will be getting a lot more new customers. But if you're in a kind of mature stage, but the basic message is just that, um, you know, the service reminders, etc., just to get that repeat business. And, um, I do like the idea that the marketing is all-encompassing. It's not just a Facebook ad and then you don't return calls or you don't turn up on time.

Yeah, it's, it's— there's a wonderful book called Broken Windows, Broken Business, and the whole premise of the book is this. It's based on some criminologists who studied here in the States crime rates and what caused crime rates to increase in certain areas. And what they discovered is that when you went into a community that allowed broken windows to remain— so in other words, you, you go to a commercial business district and you walk through and there's a lot of broken windows, what inevitably happened over time was graffiti would start appearing. Next, petty crimes would start increasing. Next, more violent crime. Now, again, that's a slow progression that took place, but what they discovered was the broken windows that left— that were left and, you know, not fixed communicated a message that there was no police presence and that people weren't paying attention to the petty crimes that were taking place. And so whether subconsciously or directly, the messaging grew and the crimes grew, etc. And so the book Broken Windows, Broken Business takes that same principle and looks at it from a business perspective. And it talks about how, you know, the smudges on your front door, if someone's walking into your place of business is communicating a marketing message to your customer. To your point, if you're, if you're saying you provide excellent service, but you show up late to the majority of your, your service calls, right? There's something off there. That's a broken window that needs to be addressed. And all of those things combined compound into your true marketing message. Because that's who you truly are.

I'm trying to think of it like a good way of saying this, but just kind of, you kind of, if you are busy and you're just, you're trying to juggle like multiple things, like especially if you're a solo, a sole trader, um, you are juggling a lot of different hats all of the time. And, um, you know, it is easy, like if there's traffic or the last job overrun, etc., etc. These small details definitely are not perhaps as high as they should be.

Yeah, I think again, it goes back to what we originally started with though. It's figuring out how do we serve our customers better, right? That one thought, that one decision will impact the way we show up. It will impact the way we talk about our services to the customers. It impacts so many other areas. So again, if you leave this conversation with nothing else today for anyone listening, it would be that like the core of great marketing starts with a really great understanding of your market.

Okay. And then just to kind of go slightly further, if like the first steps would be to understand your customers, but actually make sure that you're doing the basics first. Before doing any kind of— basically fix a leaky bucket before you actually start, you know, spending money on Facebook or whatever you're going to do.

Yeah, absolutely. But again, the deception is, and the lure is, it's quote unquote far easier to go spend a bit of money on Facebook or on Google or, you know, any, any platform or any form of media. That's easy to do, quote unquote. It's way more difficult to fix some of these operational things, right? To fix the things that enable us to service our customers better.

Well, I think the reason for that is we've kind of skirted around it slightly, but I kind of have a belief that all businesses are a reflection of their founders or the leaders. And, you know, I'm also a co-founder. And so, you know, the business reflects our own weaknesses and strengths. And fixing these things, it is kind of, I don't know, there's a link in there that kind of, you know, you need to grow personally to fix some of these things.

I'm 100% in agreement. It's not a very comfortable thing to think about or to talk about. But I do completely agree. I think I think it may have been Stephen Covey, maybe, who said, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Maybe it wasn't him. I don't remember exactly who said this, so maybe I'll fumble the attribution here. But they basically said that if your mindset is sloppy, your business will be sloppy. And the whole point that he was going through was making the point that our businesses truly are what you just said, a reflection of who we are as leaders. And the best place I believe to start if you want to transform your business and transform the people on your team is to start with the person in the mirror because that person in the mirror will always be the most difficult person you have to lead 100% of the time.

Yeah, you get, you have these internal kind of debates and you need to control those debates and have certainty. But yeah, it's not the— yeah, as you say, much easier to run some Facebook ads.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, well, thank you very much for your time, Wayne. I really appreciate your input and for coming on the show. And yeah, thank you very much. And that's Wayne from Ugly Mug Marketing. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I've enjoyed our chat.