today is a big deal for me because I'm handing over the microphone to Melanie and she's going to talk about all things marketing for your small business. These are questions that when you operate a small business, whether it's a hospitality business or actually anything, the questions that are happening today about marketing and marketing has really changed. It's gotten very expensive and very complicated. And it's not just the big boys that get to do the marketing things here. We get to do it too in small business. So Melanie, it's all yours. Thanks. So I sprung this on Dan, he's always talking about wanting to be raw and unedited and I just told him moments before we started this livestream that I was going to hijack his livestream, I didn't care what subject he had in mind for today, that I thought it was something really important for people to hear about marketing and small business people. And you started and said that I was gonna answer these questions but that's not how it's gonna work, I'm gonna ask you questions because you are the AI version of marketing for small businesses where either you have you already know the answer or you'll hallucinate a really good one for us. So in our business we do a lot of wholesale in the chocolate factory and our wholesale clients are typically other small businesses maybe not quite as small as we are but still a small business and they don't have the purchasing power for marketing. like they think they should. So we really have to make every dollar count whenever we do put money into the marketing bin. And another thing that kind of brought this up for me is I just recently joined a chocolatier forum. I think it's on Facebook. And I noticed that, you know, I went on there just to kind of see what people were talking about in the chocolate world, but they were asking business questions. They weren't just asking about a ganache, you know, recipe and solutions and flavor profile things and chocolate molds. They were asking about How do I sell my product? How do I know how to price my product? How do I know where to advertise? How do I make an ad? What needs to be in the ad? These are all questions that people were asking and I thought, dang, we do this whole live stream thing and it's called being to business. like, let's get back to the business part of it. Answering questions that people in small business might have. So I hear Dan preach all the time. I spend a lot of hours with this guy and I listen to him talk to people and sometimes I roll my eyes, actually a lot I roll my eyes, but I also listen and I get intrigued when he's giving this really great advice to people that they had no idea these things and these tools even existed. And I see them kind of light up a little bit and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, maybe we weren't even supposed to be talking about marketing or advertising, but that's where the conversation goes because Dan, you have a ... lot of knowledge on it. Some of it new knowledge, some of it older knowledge, and you have this database of people that you rely on to help you with things. So have a few questions for you. One to start with, where should they advertise? Are they looking at all forms of advertising, print, socials? Where should they go? Where should you start? Well, that's a big complicated question today. because historically you would only advertise where your customers are. But today that has gotten a little more complicated and it's gotten complicated because of ChatGPT In the past you might just do Google ads or you might worry about your search or things like SEO, you build things on your website, things like that. But today you have another audience and the other audience is generative search that is ChatGPT and being able to answer those questions and in fact, Just in our data at the chocolate factory, 40 % of people found the chocolate factory in December of this past year in 2025 through generative search. So it wasn't our SEO strategy, it wasn't keywords, it wasn't ads, it was people typing in things like corporate gifts, Texas related chocolate corporate gifts, right? Now we had. done a lot of work in this over the last year to make sure that we did pretty well in generative search. So we surfaced quite a bit of time. But I would say going forward, you probably need to be thinking about where do you put your efforts. There are going to be efforts that both go directly to your customers and then also go direct to influencing things like generative search. Awesome. So when they, how do they pick, do they decide? Because I know a lot of people don't have, again, this huge budget. How do you figure out, say I've got $1,000 a month, where should I start first? Do I just launch with an ad on Google first? Do I try to go the social media platform first? Is it totally dependent on what I'm trying to sell? Okay, so great question. And in fact, you and I have lived this recently with a client, actually, who came in and asked the same question to me during a wine and chocolate tasting. And honestly, I'm going to say the same advice I gave the client, the days of saying I have a line item budget of $1,000 to spend on marketing, those days are gone. Today, you need to be thinking about marketing in your business, particularly if you're a small chocolate business or if you're a hospitality business. Marketing needs to be part of your architecture of your business. needs to be Everybody needs to play a role in it Which means that you've got to have people at the front desk working on quality and making sure that you're getting good Google reviews and people that leave your business or putting good reviews online and you also have to have people taking social media pictures you need to make your website where you can have lots of consumer engagement because that's going to help but it can't be the thousand dollars anymore And now that's the kind of the complicated news. OK, well, if it's not the thousand dollars, what is it? Because it was always really easy just to go all go spend a thousand dollars on Facebook ads that those days are gone. And in fact, you'll lose your ass today if you just go spend money on just Facebook ads. Today, you need to be multimodal. You need to be optimizing your website. You need to be getting out and active on social media. You need to do things like YouTube. You need to write content and blogs for your site. You need to answer people's questions. You need to work on your Google reviews. So it's more complicated, but also not any more expensive. Many of these things you should be doing anyway, and they're just sweat equity. They don't really cost anything. And I will say the last thing is, is that today, AI tools are very approachable. which means that a small business can have access to the same type of tools and architecture and things that a very expensive business would have access to. That's the good news, right? That's the thing that the beauty of technology, I'm not the most technologically advanced person. I'm getting there because you're teaching me a lot of things, but it is a little bit refreshing to know that someone like me who doesn't have a lot of experience in that, I've really kind of starting to wrap my arms around all these different little tools and things to use. you really don't know what's going to work until you just try it. You got to just do something. You got to pull the trigger. You got to see what works and Part of that, we started a new reservation platform like Dan's mentioned back in November in our busiest time. And one of the cool parts about it is this is first time that we had a reservation platform that asked the question, where did you hear about us? And I know we as consumers see that and sometimes I stop and I answer that question and sometimes I don't. And now I have realized I really need to answer that question. It's not just a silly survey question. It's something these businesses money is depending on your answer on where they continue to fill that bucket of advertising on what platform and where you saw it. So. I found that out firsthand when we had the first few people that said, you know, ChatGPT suggested it, and Dan's been preaching about that all along. We need to get found on ChatGPT and I'm like, who uses ChatGPT? Well. Clearly they're using it because someone who is also making a reservation at our tiny little chocolate factory is using chat GPT to look for us in a tourist driven area. So I think it is important that people answer that question. We call that first party data. Okay. So that's basically data that you're getting directly from a consumer and it's invaluable. It was in so many ways because it's not just like, where do you find us? But you know, did you have a great time? You'll leave us a review, right? All the kinds of things that consumers can give directly to your business. That's invaluable. And particularly things like that, because we don't really have any way of searching that information, right? I don't have a way of like going in and actually asking asking that information to a consumer like from ChatGPT or Google search. I don't really know. But here when someone tells you, I found you in the ad in a magazine, that's incredible because we have really no way of tracking to that person actually sees an ad and coming to see us. So those are anecdotal evidence. I will say business owners, you have to be really careful and yet be a contrarian. Because if people come in and say, I found you on TripAdvisor, well, you're tempted to say, well, I need to go all in on TripAdvisor. Well, the answer is no. You need to go all in on Yelp and Google and all of the other input mechanisms. It may be that you're only using one channel, when in reality, there's lots of different channels. Now sometimes your customers may like to go in a certain channel, but in our business in chocolate, we see customers from all over. They're from 18 to 70 or 80 years old. And so they have a different way of finding us. So we have to be thinking, okay, well, are we marketing to those channels? One little word that I live by is that people can't buy your product if they don't know you exist. So we have to figure out a way to make people know we exist. Yeah, I think that's the golden question. mean, that's what we hear from everyone. We hear from other wholesale clients of ours and just other businesses saying, nobody knows that I exist. Or it makes me so mad when people come in the door and say, how long have you been here? I didn't even know you existed. And they've been there for five plus years. That's a common problem. And you know, Melanie, I say these words all the time and I'll see them again today. She'll probably roll her eyes. So maybe the camera won't be cut to her, but in business, I'm pretty simple. And there's really only two things you need to know. You need to know your customer acquisition cost. So as a business owner back to that thousand dollars, like how much does it cost me to acquire a customer? It can cost a lot if you're on certain online businesses. And if you're running just a Facebook ad strategy, I'll give you Inside Baseball for Hill Country Chocolate It costs us sometimes about 20 to 25 to $30 a conversion. OK. Wow. You think about it. On an $80 box of chocolate, when we're spending $30, right, $30 just to get the customer, not counting the price of producing the product. uh all everything else, your margins can get really compressed. So it's how much it costs you to acquire a customer, number one. And then number two, what's the long-term value of the customer? How long can you keep them in your business? That's why things like quality and reviews and experience and, Mel, you make fun of me, but seven-star service model, right? Did you get people into your business that really enjoy purchasing from you? then it makes it a lot more sense to spend money on the front end. It's a lot easier to spend $30 on a Facebook conversion if that person's gonna purchase products from you four, seven, 10, 15 times in the future. It makes it much simpler to spend that money on the front end, but those two things have to work together. So do people have to get fancy with it? So you talked about how you have to make these social posts, and we all know you do. No one's being found if they're not on some social media platform. But as a not-so-technical business owner, does it do you any good if you make a post to do the whole boost your post thing? Well, I'm not a big fan of the boost your post thing, obviously, because we can do more sophisticated stuff here. But if you don't have the ability to do that, it's not a bad thing to do. But you're much better off taking a good post and running it as an ad. So actually going into like, know, meta ads and actually taking that post and running as an ad, you get a lot more analytics. It's a richer. You can do things like that. I do think that you can't rely today just on social posting. And I'm going to get disagreement from a lot of people on this, but I think a lot of people today are visitors and they're consumers of content. They're not necessarily using that content directly to always purchase an item. I think trending things are a different story. But like for us, we focus on social media mostly as engagement in brand awareness, right? So it gets people in front of them. They know that we exist. They're out there. But as far as like driving a purchasing decision, it's hard. And so to drive a purchase decision, people are more sophisticated today. They often do different things. They often don't just look at a Facebook ad and go, I'm buying the chocolate. They often do a Facebook ad and then they look you up on Google or they look you up on Perplexity and they see what it says. They look up your reviews. And so by the time we get a customer and we have data to show this, they've often surfaced four or five times. They've looked at four or five things before they've actually made a purchase. So today I would say you need to focus on two things. You got to have that engagement strategy, the social media, It's a non-starter. You have to be out on social media. And then secondly, work on things to help you get found on ChatGPT. So that could be things like blogs on your website. It could be things like YouTube. It's creating longer form content. Reddit will work on short form content, but to me it's too risky for most businesses. So how do you know? I'm just little old me, I have a small little bagel shop and I want to start doing some advertising. How do I know if I'm creating an ad that's engaging or how do I find that information on what is trending and what are some resources that I can go to to say, hey, I think I'm doing the right thing or no, my ads aren't engaging anyone, what am I doing wrong? Is it just a matter of me myself scrolling? going that looks great and look what so and so's doing and kind of copying things or Let me divide this question into two things. Okay, first of all, like, how do you find out if things are working? Okay, well, the first thing is you have to have data. You have to have data. You have to go find the information somewhere. So the cool thing is both Google and Facebook have incredible amounts of data. They know how people choose. They know what people are looking for. They have all this data. So you can go find it. The bad thing is for small businesses, particularly for our size business, it's too complicated. So if you log into Google search console, you're gonna be over. Yeah, I could never figure out that whole analytics. I don't know what I'm looking at. I'm looking at this giant graph of stuff that doesn't make sense. Well, even if it makes sense, often there's not direct actionable things. So you go in and you find this data and you think, my God, this sucks, right? Or, wow, that seems to be working. I'm not really sure. And so you end up falling into this bucket of, I don't know what to do with it. I might have the information I have to do with it. AI is changing that and we can talk about that later because that's actually what we call content intelligence in our world. But that intelligence layer about telling us what to do is actually changing. The second thing is, is that small businesses often don't do enough for the data to mean anything. And in the classic example is Facebook ads. I have seen this, I bet I've seen this a thousand times with small business. Please, if you're listening to this podcast, do not make this mistake. You cannot go run a Facebook ad campaign for a couple weeks and spend maybe $1,000 and get any meaningful data at all. In fact, you almost need to spend money and let Facebook learn from you. They need to they need to go spend your money and they need to start to see what works and what doesn't. Meta is really smart, so they'll figure it out pretty quick. But a lot of times people go spend. I've seen it. They go spend two to three thousand bucks on on fifteen different Facebook creatives, right? And they don't get enough individual data to really matter because they just don't have enough. They don't have enough movement. They don't have enough sales. How do they even know? So then they get frustrated because they spent the $3,000 and they didn't see any improvement. So then they don't do it anymore. So some platforms like Facebook, you gotta hone up. If you're gonna do it, you gotta commit to doing it and not just pittle around and doing it. So that's often risky for small businesses who don't have a lot of money. And then the second thing is be careful with all this expert advice telling you to A B test everything, right? Like I'm going to A B test, you know, my email campaigns or my thumbnail or my headline or whatever. You don't have enough traffic for that. So you're not going to be able to tell. mean, you get, you you run, you go do a blog post or something and you get three purchases. Hang on. It helps you to figure out if you A B test, which social post is going to happen because you're not getting enough data back. So a little tip for what we do at Hill Country Chocolate is when we do something like that, we look at overall traffic to our website. Immediately we do live tracking. Okay, so we go publish something like a YouTube video within the next two hours We look at who visits our website and we look at that traffic data if it just worked or not Did it work? mean is it like thumbs up or thumbs down? Not we're not we don't have enough traffic often on some of the content we do To actually make a difference that this works and this doesn't we're not there yet But we're just trying to decide does this work overall and small businesses can do that today. That's pretty easy if you back to like the, I had a $3,000 budget and I went and spent all this money on these ads and let Meta kind of do their thing, but I couldn't tell if it did anything or not, what are you suggesting you do instead? Instead of having 15 creatives, do I just need maybe one or two and I need to dive in with more money or it just needs to be over a longer period of time? Am I dribbling it out? Great question. what I'm what I and again I'm gonna be people are gonna push back on me but I'm gonna tell you a limited budget and you're going out on Facebook ads have only a few creatives one maybe two that's all you really have go ahead and put money into those campaigns and watch if it starts working you scale it and you scale it fast So if Meta starts to surface your ad, you start to get conversions from it, it seems to be working, then start putting money on it. Because all of a sudden you've hit it, you've figured it out. And if all of a sudden you're not getting any conversions, it's not working, you ditch it. You just push scratch, you scrap it, and you start over, right? So You don't necessarily get locked into setting a campaign from day one and just saying, okay, this is what I'm doing. I'm spending $10,000 and this is my ad set. That's old school thinking and I think it's stupid. Okay, so since we're talking about ads and, you know, maybe picking one or two good creatives, do I need to go out and purchase some $10,000 camera and a bunch of, you know, microphone equipment in order to make a TikTok video in my business? Do I need to go hire a professional? And by professional, I mean one of these, you know, 21-year-old kids that knows a lot more about making these things than we do. Or is this something that I can start to do just on my own and refine my skills as I go along? Or is it worth investing in a professional right off the bat? I think two things. think it all depends on your competency at doing filming and things like that. And I would just tell you, turn the camera on. You hear me say that at the factory. Just turn the camera on. Start recording. I don't really care what you're recording. Just record it. Start to capture content with your business. So many businesses today, they have no process. Everybody is afraid to capture content, so they just don't capture it. Start capturing content if you're going to do that. Number two, you don't need a lot of expensive equipment. Now to make them look kind of polished and have captions and things like that, you do need a few tools, but those tools aren't expensive. I mean, there things like CapCut, which is easy to get online. Everybody can figure that out. There's AI tools today like Opus Clip, which literally you can film the whole video and turn it in and it'll create the shorts for you if you're trying to create short form content. For display ads, you can do the same thing. You can actually go into things like Claude or ChatGPT with the AI platforms and you can say, hey, this is what I wanna sell. And you can train it about your business and let it give you feedback. We do not publish an ad today that I don't screenshot and feed into Claude and get feedback. I will say for six months, we have not done that. Every single ad that we publish or that's displayed out of any form, I feed it into Claude who knows about us and Claude gives me feedback. So how did you get Claude to know about us? Did you ask him to like, how do you do that? I mean, as a business owner too, small business, I'm starting out, I don't even know how I train AI on my business. How do I do that? And that's why we use Claude is because Claude allows you to do a couple things. One, you can set up a master prompt about your business. So you can just basically go in and can just feed it all to him if you want. just type it out one time, one set of documents. In fact, you don't even have to do that. You can type out some of it. We dictate it, but you can type out some of it. And you can ask Claude to create your master prompt. And Claude will create one for you. And then you can edit it, save it inside Claude. That's number one. And then number two, we set up projects. So we have a project inside Claude called ads, right? And it's got everything in there about our ads, things that have worked, things that don't, our reporting. I've got maybe if I find a blog post, What's the best way to run Facebook ads for chocolate shops, right? I'll copy that blog post and I'll put it inside that project And so then when we want to do an ad We actually can go into Claude and ask us to help us with the content The one that I use a lot Melanie will laugh at me is that I use Harry Dry he's punchy and he's concise and he's iterates a lot on shorter words and making people stop the thumb scroll, So we literally, literally in our business at Hill Country Chocolate, we have a Harry Dry project. where we will drop in things like, okay, know, just happened yesterday. Like, just happened yesterday, Valentine's Day, right? We were just talking about Valentine's Day, I said, hey, let's run this through Harry Dry right? And you know, and it came back with something kind of punchy. I think it was something like, you know, flowers, flowers disappears by Tuesday, chocolate disappears by Monday, but nobody remembers the flowers. They enjoyed the chocolate or something like that, right? But the kicker is we use that technology to influence us. So it gives us a better shot at having an ad that works. Yeah, if nothing else, it just gives you inspiration. You know, because you've come to me with things with these Harry Dry things and I'm like, no, no, no, no, I don't like that. But I do like, you know, this part and that part and it can help you kind of build some stuff. And you can leverage those together, right? So you can go in and build the context around your business and you can like, okay, this, we're to run this ad. So maybe it's a hairy dry ad, right? And it tells you the content. It'll actually give you a prompt that you can go paste into ChatGPT to give you the image or into Canva. within minutes without hiring an agency, you've created a compelling Facebook ad that's just, just as good as the agency. That's the kicker is that you're going to be able to create content that's just as powerful as a small business that used to cost thousands of dollars a month to be able to do. And then the final question you asked, which I didn't answer, but I'm going to answer it was well, and this will also be very controversial. You can't hire people to do your social. I know we're gonna get pushback on that, but I rarely 100 % agree with you and I 100 % agree. It's the same as you can get advice on your business, but nobody knows your business better than you do. Nobody knows your clientele better than you do, even if you think you don't know. Just stop and think about it for a minute in a quiet space. And you do know, you know your clientele, you know the people that are coming in and you also know how you want to be perceived on social media and in your ads, which I think is why you can't really hire people to do that because they are never going to understand every single nuance of what it is that you're doing and where you personally want to take it. I see people and the reason I asked that question of do I need to go hire a professional because There are good ones. There are good people who just get it and they're really great at putting their selves in your shoes. They're still not there, you know, 24 seven to catch this content. And they're not there when, the inspiration strikes for a catchy little comment that you come up with. There are good people that do that, but more often than not, I hear people saying, we paid a lot of money and we had these people come in to create, you know, social stuff for us and ads. And I didn't like any of them. And that money is just gone. Yes, let me clarify one thing because before I get hate mail from some of my friends who say, okay, that's stupid advice. We run an ad agency. Why are we doing that? Okay, a couple things. It is okay to hire an ad agency to run your ads. What an ad agency can't do though, I don't think, is help you create all of the ad content. You can't outsource marketing for your business today. People are too, they're too skeptical. They can figure out if you're honest or not. within the moment of three seconds of moving their thumb up their phone. And so the idea that you can hire a social poster, we see this all the time. I'm going to go hire a social poster girl that's going to come in and shoot pictures of my business twice a year. And then from those two shoots, create social media content for the entire year. Yes, you can have two posts a week of social media. But the question is, and you hear me say this all the time, does it drive sales? And no, it's not going to drive sales today because people want that authenticity, which is what you were talking about. They want that authenticity. They want to see what's happening in your business. They want real world stuff. Now running an ad campaign can be complicated. And as you know, that may be beyond the scope of most people. And if you've got the money for ads, you have the time for it. You certainly can hire an agency to run those ads for you. The architecture of setting it up. I'm probably going too long here, but this is a little inside baseball about us too. So we have another company, it's called RocketTools and we actually do our own marketing. We built a marketing company. Melanie and I did that. We built a marketing company. it all started over Facebook ads. And it all started because we made the mistake. We went out and we spent a fortune on Facebook ads. It did nothing. We hired a traditional agency. They did nothing. And we fell into those two caps. Number one, they didn't know us. And number two, we overpaid for the service. And I got frustrated. We went out and hired people in the Phillipines to run our ads. And we lowered our cost from running, hiring a company, from $3,000 a month to $1,500 a month by hiring a Filipino group of VAs, basically virtual assistants, to help us put this together. But I just thought, okay, we can do better. So then we created an AI system to help us build all of our campaigns. And initially it was just for Meta and Google. And today actually it's Meta, it's Google, Spotify, YouTube, you name it. It does all the platforms, you know. So that all happened because we were driven to it by ad spend Because ad spend for small businesses is something honestly, we didn't have a lot of money to spend. We still don't have a lot of money to spend on ads. So we have to be very frugal. But if I can spend $3,000 that I used to spend on an ad agency and I can actually spend it on real ads, I'm better off. That was basically why we created RocketTools. Absolutely, and don't think that, mean, not everyone has the means and the wherewithal to go out and create a team to do these things, but I think more of the point is just two things. One, you get what you get. mean, whatever you're willing to invest in it is what you're gonna get back out of it. So like you said, just pull the trigger, start taking photos, start taking videos, get that content. Even if you don't know what to do with it, that's where you can hand that all over to someone that can help you. Create that architecture, like you said, for your ad campaign or whatever it is, but they can't do it if they don't have the content. And it's way more expensive if you are paying a camera crew to follow you around 24-7 to get that content. You have it right there. We all have our phone in our hand. It seems impossible. I used to think it was totally impossible to do. And then you get in the habit of it, and it's not so hard to do. Some of us have our hands in things more often than others. Some of us just kind of wander around in a nice white chef coat and have the ability to get that footage while the rest are working. But there's somebody in every one of those businesses, I don't care what you do, there is somebody walking around with their phone in their hand and they can get that content and start building that library for you so that you have that to use. the second thing was that companies like RocketTools do exist. You don't have to create your own. So don't be afraid to go out, do a little bit of research, see who can help you, what their capabilities are, and kind of go from there. No, and honestly, we went overboard. Well fair. I'm a nerd and I like to build companies, but the kickers, were a little overboard. But we also, think, really early on saw the value of AI in our business and how we could leverage low cost solutions to give us big quality content back. So I would tell a business, you do not have to go hire a company. You don't have to go build a marketing company, but you do need to build the skills within your own company that take advantage of it, which means you could just subscribe to something like Claude and use it to start helping you create blog posts for your site. Don't use it to mass produce blog posts and put them on there. That's not going to do anything, but to give you inspiration and guidance and direction on your marketing activities. And that's $20 a month. So that's not a huge spend for most businesses. And honestly, that $20 a month will give you thousands of dollars in return that you would used to have to pay for. Yes be clear, when you're talking about using AI tools to help you with your marketing, we're not saying go out and have AI generate the mountain lion that runs up on the porch and puts its baby in your lap, and people are going to believe that, not this unbelievable AI junk that's going on, we're not trying to have them write us a song and do a music video or anything like that. you can create content really fast for your website, so can everybody else. So you're not differentiating. You're just using it to fine tune what you're doing and to help you optimize it. I'm using it to fine tune, challenge me, maybe inspire me, maybe offer things that I didn't really know. But the biggest use that we use for AI today, hands down in our marketing, is analyzing our data. Because honestly, even though I've done this a long time, the data is overwhelming. And so today what we're finding is we just put in a new system this week, and we're leveraging Claude to do that, we're looking at our website tracking data. We're looking at our Google console data, you know, and we're looking at things like ChatGPT results and what people are querying around the world. And we're using that to influence the content we create. We call it trophy content. Now we're not mass producing content, but when we go produce something, it takes a lot of investment. So we're going to try to make something really good because that's what people are going to use to find find us on our website. That's where we're it. Much more about the analysis, which in the past would have been impossible for a small business to do. Now it can be. Well, that's great, because that's what we were talking about. You get these analytics back, and you don't know how to decipher it. You don't know how to read it. So that's the kind of thing that you can screenshot or feed that information into AI and just say, tell me in layman's terms, what does this mean? What do I need to be doing? What's not working? And it'll analyze that for you. So you said screenshot. That's probably the most underused feature of AI is take a photograph of something. Send it in, send it in right. So the example that we use today and Melanie will laugh at me because we just did this today, but I did a report and I looked on our data and analytics on Google search console and I looked on our website traffic and what people were coming to our website for and where we were in the world. And I found out that right now, maybe because it's cold, people were searching banana bread. I don't know if people just had to make banana bread, particularly banana bread that had chocolate chips in it. And so when I looked around the world, I found out that we were ranking for that word pretty darn cool, about four. four or five in Google search. And you may think, wow, do you know, that's fantastic. We're ranking four to five. We were getting at a 2000 clicks a month on banana bread. We were getting about 22. Okay, that's not much. mean, we would have to convert a lot of them into purchasing chocolate for most for it to be meaningful. uh we do make chocolate and we make chocolate, we make chocolate, right? Which that's part of our niche, right? But by moving us from four to one, we could get 500 clicks on it. And what we found was there's a real gap. People wanted a simple recipe. So we found that from using AI, looking at those results. So we took a banana bread recipe that we already had, and we repurposed it and put out a new piece of content. that is just specifically targeting that. idea being we might could move ourselves from four to one. So that word is worth a dollar eighty. So that means if you go from four to one and you go from twenty two clicks a month to five hundred clicks a month, theoretically that's worth spending a thousand dollars in Google ads. That move, that blog post, that took a little time to do that. Right, had to use a couple of tools, but it didn't cost me $1,000 to do that. It probably cost me $3 total cost to do it. And if I can get $1,000 with the ad spend, guess this is going to go on for a while. It's $1,000 a month for a while. I'm going to get more traffic to my site. Gives me a better opportunity to convert those. So just for us, what does that mean? That means now I've got to figure out how to get that person who lands on banana bread to purchase bonbons So that's a little tricky. So you know, we're putting in a new system on our website where when people land on a blog post, they're going to see products that are related to the blog post that they can actually purchase. So yes, we're going to start selling bananas. We're absolutely not selling bananas or banana bread. I like banana bread. I don't like bananas, but I like banana bread and chocolate chips. And it sounds even better. It is kind of interesting that over the holidays we had this ice storm and I saw a lot of pictures of banana bread online. And they were sold out at the grocery store. were, there were no bananas to be found. That's strange. So we talked about needing to do all these ads and if they're working or not. We haven't talked to anything about responses. How important is it for you as the business to respond to comments? I mean, I see all these things where people are like, like and share and comment and I know that. kind of helps bump you up in the algorithm of things, but is it important that I go through and I respond to comments, both positive and negative? So I think there's two kinds of comments, right? There's social media and then there's reviews. So let's talk about reviews because that's really what matters. And the answer is yes. You should respond to 100 % of them and for two reasons. Number one, if somebody takes the time to leave a review, good or bad. then you should respect that consumer by giving a response back. So, and you will get graded by the Google algorithm better if you respond to the reviews at all. Okay, so that's lesson number one. Secondly, and it's gonna give you a better look. This is not really relevant to Hill Country Chocolate, but when we review a hospital, okay, so we do a lot of consulting for hospitals and for healthcare. When we look at a hospital that responds to every single review, we know that that hospital has better management because that management is taking user input as a priority. So every consumer will look at reviews and responses and they're going to think that. Now, the practical thing is, which is what people miss, which is a little tip, write this down, your review is part of search engine optimization. So if somebody writes a paragraph, even if it's negative, and you respond with a paragraph, all of that context gets put into Google. So it's better to not write like, thank you. this is where the fluff comes in. comes in you should respond back and say thank you Melanie for visiting the chocolate factory for your for your bridal trip right it was great hosting you I'm glad that you enjoyed the Cabernet Sauvignon next time you come please try our Mexican Hot Chocolate Bonbons right can't wait to see you again in the Texas Hill Country for your couples trip we're glad you enjoyed spending the weekend at Onera I've never stayed in one of those tree houses before but that sounds fantastic My god, I'm totally seeing what you're doing here with your fluff If you want to, but basically what I'm doing is providing real world valuable information to Google because just like when you ask that person that visited the chocolate factory where did you find us? Now Google is going to say, wait, somebody wrote a review and you responded with you give him respect. You gave the answer back. You gave him first party data back. And so the reviews are a great way to get found on Google. And you know, when we talk about Google. I'm going to tell you one of the big things if you've got a brick and mortar business like we do and we have online too. We've talked a lot of an online ads and things like that. But for brick and mortar business, it's Google Maps. oh And a lot of things like Google Maps, they're going to look at reviews. Not only is the consumer going to look at them, but Google's going to think, well, do I even put you on the list or not? Because either your reviews aren't good, or you're not responsive, or you're not filling out your hours. So optimize your Google Business Profile, but also answer those. It's always good to answer. Yeah, there was a great piece of advice that you gave that I think was invaluable to a client this week about your consistency across all platforms. What was that thing that you were preaching about? Everything, all your information has to match everywhere. Yeah, so there's a real easy trick for getting found on Google. And it's kind of a no-brainer if you're in our business. But basically what you do is you pay a service. It's called a listing service. And you pay a fee. And it's a monthly fee. And you basically go into the listing service, and you put in the basic information that's on your Google search profile. Or you can just have it reference your Google business page. And what that will do is it will put the same consistent information across every website. So whether it's Yelp, TripAdvisor, run down the list, US Chamber of Commerce, DuckDuckGo's business site. mean, there's like 80 to 100 of these sites. Google will look to see if that's consistent. And if it's consistent across all the sites, like I'm closed on MLK Day, I'm open on New Year's Eve, here's my consistent hours, I'm disability accessible, or whatever, you have all these different things that are consistent across all those platforms, Google thinks, oh wow. You're really legit. You're real. This is a real business. I'm going to trust you more. And if I trust you more, I'm going to surface you more. So it's almost a no brainer because it's one time, set it and forget it. It does cost a little money to do, but it's well worth the spend. So as a novice, how do I find that? Do I just Google listing service and see what pops up and then see which one I can afford and. Yeah, and they're going to be incredibly expensive. And that's the the bad thing, is when you go online and you look for them, they're either going to be worthless or they're going to be expensive. Now the expensive ones generally work. You know what we did is we again not everybody can do this but I'm happy to leave something to comments that people are interested but we we actually do a deal where you don't have to purchase a year in advance a lot of these companies they don't want people coming and going because it devalues their platform so they want you to sign like a one-year contract which That was going to be my question was if you get on with the listing service, is this something you have to continue to do monthly or okay? So you're not like a one and done or a hey, every six months, I'm going to do this thing and see if everything matches. honestly, they don't want you to do that. They want you to, well, obviously they want to make money, but they really don't want you to come and go because that devalues the whole system. So they want you to sign up. So they often pressure you to sign up for a year. And honestly, it can be a thousand to $1,500 a year. in that ballpark. And as a one-time check for a small business, that's a lot. So what happened to us, we went out and actually added that to RocketTools So now you only have to buy three months at a time, which makes it lot easier to bite it off. But it's absolutely no-brainer. Virtually every business that I work, every single business that I consult on that's a small business, I recommend that they subscribe to Listing Service because it's an easy way to get found everywhere. You would think though that once you've subscribed to the listing service and they made sure that everything was consistent everywhere, why would it change? Why would they need to continue to monitor that? Because maybe you're updating your hours or holidays and then is it things like smaller directories that are just constantly pulling this information off that could be inaccurate? So the question is, it wouldn't necessarily change if you didn't ever change anything, but you're going to change something. You're going to change something. Either because Google's going to send you a note that says, are you open for New Year's Eve? Or they're going to send you a note, hey, you haven't completed your Google Business Profile. You should complete it. We'll rank you higher. And you're going to go, yeah, I'm going to do that. And you're going to go fix it. And then it's not going to be updated everywhere else. And the reason that these listing services are useful is that if you did decide to go like change your hours, which we did recently last year, right? Then all of a sudden, are you really going to be motivated to log into Facebook and to log into Apple and to log into Yelp and to TripAdvisor and to Biznet and to US Chamber of Commerce? I mean, I could. Can you remember all those passwords to log into? And in probably most of him multi factor and you'll get blocked out Apple doesn't have to me all the time and so yeah. Do it and Google interpret that is that are you legit? You really are. They're not going to not show you, but you're going to miss that subtle trigger to actually get you ranked higher. It's a no brainer to me to be on a listing service. That's awesome. Well, I'm done asking my novice questions. Is there anything that I didn't ask that we need to do? I feel like I'm probably opening a can of worms, but I feel like if someone really just didn't get something, if they would drop something in the comments, you would respond because you're a responder. I would. That's what you do. respond. You know, I think the big take on messages today is people can't buy from you if they don't know you exist. Number two, they're not going to buy from you if they don't think you're real. So uh things like responding to reviews and responding to comments, they're going to know that you're real and you know, run a great business. That's the rule number one. And then in take on marketing as an architecture within your business, it become a meaningful part of your business. The founder needs to be involved. Everybody needs to be involved. You can't outsource it and write a check. mean, I think that's really sort of the take home message. And yes, I do respond to every comment. And just last little note here, respond to comments on social media too. And that can get complicated, right? Because you're on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, there are all these different platforms. and Melanie mentioned it in a previous podcast, but we unify all of our... inputs into one platform, which makes it a lot easier, but respond to every comment. Now, a little known fact too, the more you respond to comments, the more those platforms will surface to you. And if you actually get to direct messaging people, that really helps you get found more on this platform. engage, if you're going to be on the platforms, play a role and engage in that particular conversation. Awesome. Wow, yeah, was great. Yeah. I hope y'all found this useful. We will respond to every comment. It may be Melanie rather than me. I'm sorry. She's really good at responding. She does have the Harry Dry style. But until next time, leave us comments, send us an email. We actually listen to what people send us and that helps us come up with topics to talk about on this podcast. And so until next time, thanks for joining us.