Monique Idemudia: Uncover the Digital Deficiencies In Your Business To Grow

Welcome to the Science of C. X podcast. My name is Steve papa's a former serial entrepreneur turned C. X obsessed expert and each week we bring you an inspiring message and insight into how customer experience can catapult your business to soar grow and accelerate beyond what you thought was possible. We seek out experts to interview and help you on your journey to see X in the Science of C. X. Well welcome everybody to another episode of the Science of C. X. As always, I'm your host, steve Pappas and we try to keep bringing you all types of aspects of the customer experience world as you know from last season and continuing on this season, we really search high and low for the best experts out there that can help in light and inform you about new areas that you need to know about in C. X. So we talked to consultants, we talked to agency owners, we talked to folks that are on the front lines of C. X. We talked to see X people within brands that we all love and admire to bring you this information. And hopefully if you go through the entire season, you'll have almost a little mini M. B. A background on what it is that we do around here and why I especially, I'm so passionate about customer experience because in the end it's all about the customer. The customer pays our salaries, the customer tells us what works, what doesn't work and in the end, if the customer doesn't revolve around everything that we do, we're doing it wrong today. We have a very interesting guests. We have Monique I. D. Media and she comes to us today from ST pete florida and is probably enjoying a little bit of sun. We're here in new Hampshire. We're having more snow as always. So Monique welcome and thanks for coming onto the show today. Thank you so much for having me steve. I'm super excited to be here. We are too. We're glad you're here because they're interesting stories here that we want to talk about and we want to give you guys a little bit of background on Monique. So let me tell our folks in the audience a little bit more about you. So Monique is the founder of Dragon Digital Marketing and that's a digital marketing agency for small businesses and she's based in ST Petersburg florida. Monique is very passionate about educating and inspiring small business owners to build an online presence and really grow and explode their business with the power of great digital marketing. So she's an execution driven consultant that not just talks the talk, but she also walks the walk Monique, let's get started here. And if you could tell our audience just a little bit about what it is that you do in general. And I've got a bunch of questions and we'll just jump off from there. Right. Sure, of course. So my agency Dragon Digital marketing help small businesses with their inbound digital marketing. So we create content and we helped to promote and distribute that content across various digital marketing channels. We do email marketing, we do blogging, podcasting, video, audio, graphic design, social media marketing. So all different types of content that helps small businesses grow and scale organically. It's pretty much almost everything that small business needs today. And I find that founders of new businesses or new startups, they generally understand the idea that they're trying to deliver on and they're trying to execute on an idea or a product or a service. But one of the critical points for them growing their business is really the whole digital world and that's not really something in everybody's repertoire. So I'm glad we have you on today to really discuss, especially for the small business owner or the small business entrepreneur, what are the paths that they can take and what would be the first step? So let's say I have a small business and I came to you and I said Monique, I've got a problem. I know that I could be promoting the business and marketing the business better and wider. What would you say would be kind of a first place? You'd start the discussion. The first step is definitely the market research. You have to know what you're doing. You have to be clear about where you are right now in the present moment and then where you want to be in the future and set your goals accordingly and then make a plan on how to get there. So you have to know your position in the market, what you stand for, where you want to be, and of course the problem that you want to solve and for whom you want to solve it. So you have to know your buyer personas really well. There's a lot of research involved and getting really clear about that. And then you can get started taking the action. So that brings up a great kind of a step by step process for small business to start thinking about this, research is probably not necessarily readily available. I don't have it all in my head. So where do you start looking for this? I would imagine there's a process that you have to put in place to start looking for all of these things, sitting down with the business owner first. But then I don't want to say it's hard for founders, but sometimes them enunciating what the problem is that they're solving, they just do it. It's habit. It's not something they always think about. They don't necessarily think about the exact persona of who they're selling to and who they sell to better. So how do you get that out of them? I mean, is there a series of questions, is there kind of an interview process that you do? Just so people understand? What are they in for? Yes, absolutely. It's a series of questions that you ask yourself and your existing customers. So a bio persona is really a semi fictional representation of your ideal customer. So you can make some educated guesses of things that you know, and just background knowledge that you have in your head, but you also have to ask your actual customers to know what they think. Because oftentimes when we just assume things, we're assuming the wrong things that are not actually true. So we have to get that validation to just validate our ideas and our goals or not just putting in all that work and effort all for nothing. So it's a series of question that you ask yourself and your customers starting from the age, what social media platforms they hang out on like culture, behavior, demeanor, interests, all kinds of things. Then when you're in B two B, it's questions about the organization, the hierarchy there, the report line, what kind of technology they use, what kind of problems do they have with that? What integrates well with each other? What doesn't integrate well with each other? What types of communication do they prefer? Do they prefer talking on the phone or using email or chat? You know, whatever it may be and really, really nail it down. Think about the mission that they're on, think about the vision of the business or of the person and really, really going down there, think about the buying center, who is involved in making the buying decision. It's never just one person maybe the person who allocates the budget and the resources and gives the okay for that purchase is not the user of your solution. So a different person uses it and be to see. Oftentimes a person's spouse can be like a huge influence or gatekeeper or decision maker or whatever it may be. So think about who can potentially vito, who you want to involve in your sales conversation in your marketing messaging, who you want to address in your campaigns and so on and so forth. And we go into really deep depths there to really nail it down. Yeah, great. Well, as you were talking, I was starting to think of various small businesses that I'm aware of, and I would imagine that a lot of those owners don't really keep that kind of information at the ready. Right? So I think about some businesses that maybe retail based, I wonder if they know exactly why somebody comes into their store. I wonder if they know what that person is looking for. I wonder when people called, do they write down why people call? Do they write down and ask, what did you come in looking for? Did you find what you were looking for now? How many times do you go to a store? And they say, did you find everything you wanted? That's great. But that's already assuming that they're bringing it to the register to pay, but more for understanding why they walked into the store. Initially, I've seen a lot of physicists where they don't even write down the telephone calls, they don't capture the phone calls that come in. Maybe if they found out that 100 calls a month were asking hours, maybe there's a problem with their online presence for their hours, whether their website, their google record or some other thing. But do you find that people really write these things down, or do they really have to think hard about some of the answers that you asked them? Yes. It's definitely necessary to track that to be able to measure your performance and measure your success and the deviation from your goal. So they should track it. We also help with the tracking implementation there, and then just think hard and think long and think about what you get asked a lot. What are some frequently asked questions, what are some questions that you don't get as much and then we can kind of rank the importance of things and create a persona that way. And then of course you have tools that you can leverage to. For example on facebook you have the facebook audience insights tool, You can see what interests people have and what pages they like, maybe your audience likes to eat oreo cookies or whatever it may be. Then you can incorporate that in your messaging. You have your google analytics so you can see what pages are the most visited on your website, what kind of social media post performed the best and what are people just the most interested in? Look at the search volume of certain keywords in your industry, what are just the hottest topics that people are interested in and want to learn more about and start taking it from that approach. And then obviously you can do surveys, you can just call people up and ask them directly and just show that you care about them. They're your customers, you want to help them out and make their life better, so you don't have to figure it all out on your own. There is a lot of help and a lot of tools that you can use as well. That's great. So now I understand from my research and the conversations we have had you fundamentally approach all of this from the small business perspective. And I got to imagine that there are a lot of agencies out there that are probably targeting small businesses. Can we talk about how you approach it fundamentally different than others that they may be calling on? Yes, we see a lot of agencies focusing a lot on the creative. So they come up with a lot of different ideas and tell you like, oh you could do this, you can do that, you could do this and it's just a bunch of ideas, but there's nothing really behind it. So there's not really a strategy behind it. The implementation is not that great. And at the end of the day the strategy is the plan of action that you strategically mapped out to reach your goals. So you don't just end up with a pretty looking instagram feed or whatever, but you actually see results and we focus a lot on strategy. So that's one difference. And then we also focus a lot on our eye. So we really work hard on not being distracted by vanity metrics like likes and number of subscribers or comments or whatever it may be. We want to get a positive return on investment for our clients and we track the attribution so we can measure everything metrics and with analytics create detailed reports and that's the power of digital marketing and that's so wonderful because we weren't able to do that with traditional marketing. You had no idea how many I've also had on your billboard or on your newspaper out or whatever. But with digital you can see all the data so we just track it and we can attribute every sale, every success of your marketing campaign, even if it's an awareness campaign or whatever it may be to a specific action that we took to specific marketing campaign. And we can tell you the ri and we make sure that it's profitable by mapping it out, tailor to your small business in the first place. So we don't believe in like cookie cutter approaches and implementing the same system like coffee and pays to each and every one of our clients. We really tailor it and it's really made for you. It's custom made for your business for you, by your persona. And no two businesses are like, I think I know a lot of what you're saying from a agency perspective, it's all about creating the visuals, it's creating the look and the feel and the personality of the website or of the instagram theater of the Youtube channel or whatever it is, it's all about the visuals. But at the end of the day, let's talk about the owner cares, right? The owner of the entrepreneur to them, it's how are they going to feed their family? Right. It's what brings in the most revenue for the value of the digital marketing? Not, oh, it would be nice to have this, but nobody is looking at it or it's nice to have this in such a pretty way but that's not the area that's converting into leads which convert into sales. So I think that's an important point to make for them getting documents signed while we're all working from home now. That's been tough. We all know that pain because we've all felt it and been through it. We built a better solution. Seeing the problem that everyone has gone through now that we're working from home to get documents and contracts signed just requires so much effort and it's been difficult for everyone. We've solved that problem with sign pdf doc dot com. Sign pdf doc dot com is your one stop simple solution to get all of your documents commented shared and signed easily. You can even import from google docs and dropbox into a single manageable dashboard sign up today for your free account at www dot sign pdf doc dot com. But let's also talk about the friction that in the course of what you do, how do you reduce the friction to do business with this small business client of yours? Because sometimes they may come to you and they say, hey, we're just not making the sales, and in many cases it may be because there's a lot of friction in doing business with them or they haven't made it easier. What are the things around that that you talk about how to make things easier, whether it's in person or it's just digital and it's online? What are the important things to think about that? Make it easier for someone to give you their money to find you as a trusted advisor to do business with you? Yes, exactly. So a lot of times like you've already touched up on, there is a deviation between what they want and what they actually need. Some things are just nice to have, but they're not going to drive you any sales. So you're not going to be able to agree your business, which is the goal of most small business owners, all of them, I would argue you're not running a non profit organization. And the way that you can grow your business and make more money is by helping more people out. It's a win win. You have to solve that problem that you solve for more customers and help more people out to put yourself in their shoes and imagine yourself in their situation, what do they actually want? And a great way to do that is by creating user stories and a user story has three main components. The first one is the persona, right? That's your buyer persona. The second one is the feature of your product or service that you offer. And the third one is the need that that features satisfies because oftentimes people will come to you with something that they want, but that's not what they actually want. There's something behind it, which you have to uncover. For example, as a small business owner, I want to generate more website traffic and leads so I can attract more customers to my business and grow my small business. So the persona and that example would be the small business owner and the feature would be more website traffic and leads. But why do they want more website traffic and leads? They don't just want the trafficking leads. They want to make more money and grow their business, right? Nobody wants more instagram followers. The followers themselves don't bring them anything. Why do they want those followers? They want to grow their brand awareness. They want more people to know them and to like them and to visit their website and get more sales as a blogger, you maybe want to create more content to get more search engine traffic, but why do you want that traffic to get more readers to get more subscribers to just grow your audience or your social influence? You want clout. So you have to uncover those reasons and really put yourself in your customer's shoes. And then you can create a user journey and the user journey is a top level view of how your user in Iraq with your product or service. And that step by step you just go through the steps. So the first that will be that a person browses the internet, that could be google, that could be a social media platform and then they find you. So the second step will be they see your content, they see you pop up in the search results of google and then they click through and the third step that will be that they land on your landing page for example, then they consume the content on that page, whatever it is that they see right, that would be the fourth step and then they perform an action. Hopefully they follow your call to action and that action could for example be to subscribe to your newsletter in some way shape or form opt in. So then they've opted in, the sixth step is they receive whatever they've opted in for, they receive your lead magnet. They consume more content to follow up content that you sent them and then after that they can make an appointment with you, book a consultation, book a session, whatever it may be, It could be a purchase if you have an e commerce store, it can be a workout of your personal trainer, whatever you offer, go through the single steps and then also visualize that specific flow that the user follows within that journey. So you want to take screenshots and be very aware of what they see. What kind of pages do they visit? What kind of emails do they open? What do they see? What information do they have? So you know what they've been going through you know with the context, what information they already have, what information you still have to communicate with them. What is very important that you have to put above the fold and yeah just map it out and go through that and make it as frictionless as possible. You want to have a web design at state of the art. It can't be cluttered. Everything has to serve a purpose for them to take the desired action that you want them to take. So make use of white space, have a clear navigation, make sure all of the links are working. A lot of people are using website templates and don't have a custom boat website. They come with some default social media icon sometimes in the corner and they lead to nowhere. Like why do you have twitter icon on your website if you're not even on twitter and that's just the button that leads nowhere. All of that don't allow people to jump off important steps. For example, take like the not far away and give people only two options. Either they opt in or they close the browser tab and that's it. So don't allow people to get lost and avoid image sliders with large images that take forever to load. People are impatient. Nowadays you cannot have a low speed that's over three seconds. You're going to see a huge drop of because people are just not waiting anymore. So you want to have a fast loading speed and avoid things like that that slow your site down. Have good contrast, make sure the text is readable, your font size is large enough, your headlines are descriptive and straight to the point. All of that. That's just the state of the art work design. Have it look clean and make sure that everything is designed to facilitate bringing your customer to the goal. And for example, if you have a physical store, it's not a website as show interest and care. Ask the person what are you buying that dress for? Maybe the woman is buying the dress to go to prom with me. She's going to a wedding, we wish is going to another event. That's how you know what your customers are looking for and why they come to you and what they want to buy a certain item for. So up to them if they come into your store and just ask what they're looking for, how you can help them, if they're just browsing for no reason. And then also write it down and track it and ask your sales people and your assistance, whatever it may be, what people are looking for and record and track those answers in some way. So you don't lose that information and get all of the insights that you can possibly get because you can draw conclusions from that and always become better and better and better. Tweak your marketing, tweak your entire customer experience if you use that to your advantage and not just waste all of that precious potential. Wow, that's great. As you talked about the steps in that process, one thing that stuck out to me is back in the process of consuming the content. And it struck me that that's also an area that your building trust with your client or your future client. How important is developing content and developing the content marketing aspect of this? And is that something you guys also help out with? Because at that point they're probably doing a search and they're finding four others. How do they build trust and say I want to work with this company. Is it it through the consumption of the content marketing that they've put out there? Yes, exactly. You build trust through content. So content is what helps you build that know like and trust Factor because it allows a person to learn more. Most people will not be ready to buy from you right away, never having heard anything from you. They see your name for the first time. They see a company named from the first time. They don't know anyone who's ever bought something from you before. And yeah, they just never heard any success story from you and you're just a stranger to them. So obviously there is some hesitation, there's some concerns. There's some objections and consumers now they're savvy. They want to make informed buying decisions. So if you can be the one who clears everything up and teaches them more about the different options that they have with the problems that they're facing, what kind of different solutions there are, what's the best for them? Why is it the best? What are some pros and cons create some comparison content, create some how to content and just educational stuff. That can be videos, that can be blog articles, that can be in the form of having a podcast, designing infographics where they can see everything, like at one glance looking at that image at that graphic and that helps them to make a more informed buying decision. And that way you build trust, you showcase your expertise and you have the chance to leave a positive impression because impressions count. You want to establish yourself as a professional, as a legit business, as an established brand, as an expert in your field and as a trustworthy person, showcase some social proof and just use that to show them that you're the best person to solve their problem and they should definitely buy from you and why you're better than your competition. Because most likely you have some competition. That's the only one who offers what you offer. So you have to make that very, very clear in a direct comparison. So it's easily consumable. It's easy to understand. Break it up. Don't like hide it in walls of text, visualize it. Use short paragraphs, highlight things, bold things, use lists, use tables to make it really clear. A lot of people nowadays they don't really read all of the content word for word anymore. They just skim through it and they keep on scrolling. So you have to make it very clear at the first sight while you're better, use images, make it as rich of an experience as possible. Perfect. So usually when we get to this point in the podcast, I ask all of our guest experts to offer our audience members an exercise or to write as to what can they do on their own to better understand why the digital side of the house is very important today and is only getting more important, even though some people can look at twitter and other social media as really clouded or cluttered and it's noise, it's hard to raise above the noise. What can we do to make our small business owners out there or even departments within larger businesses better understand what can they do as an exercise? Maybe when they're on with their team on their next zoom team call or something like that? Do you have an exercise that we could give them? Yes, definitely ask yourself what makes you unique and determine something that you have that the others don't and make that shine, make that stand out, promote that, communicate that clearly through your messaging and make it something that's valuable for your users, your clients, your customers, it has to be something that provides value for them and then create a user story, put yourself in their shoes and see things from their perspective. Walk through the journey, A lot of business owners don't do that. They just see things from their perspective but have never really thought about things from the perspective of a stranger who discovers them for the first time and they don't have all of that context and all of that knowledge. How easy is it for them to find that knowledge and to locate it on your website? Do some years are testing and see okay, what is my conversion rate? What is my task success rate. How many people have managed to complete that task? That is such an important conversion for me and how many people have failed to do. So what do we have to tweak? What is the time on task? Maybe people understand how they can get to a certain piece of information but it takes them like three minutes which is like way too long. They should be able to complete it in less than 30 seconds and so on and so forth. And start tracking things. Start setting up things in your analytics so you can track your conversion rates and you know how your pages perform, track your ri and really create a user flow as well. So the task would definitely be create a user flow. Refine you buy your personas, make them really detailed. I have a template for that that you can grab on my website. It's a free by your persona template and it will help you a lot to see things from your customers eyes and just craft a better customer experience all around your customer and customer has to be in the center of your business. So you can have that win win because if you can help your customers out in a better way, then that's how you agree your business and you make more money for yourself and you have that win win I guess in that exercise set that you talked about what makes you unique. Make that shine, create the user journey, create the user story and take the journey. Does that also help them uncover where the deficiencies are within their digital side of their marketing? Exactly yes. Because then you can see, oh the next step will be for them to go from that page to that page, chipper from that action, but there's not even a link leading there from that page. So we have to put it there or they'll discover, oh this is such an important thing that can be like five levels deep into the site structure of my website. That should be very present on the home page above the fold or like have its own link and your main site navigation or whatever to make it more present. Do you see people overlooking something because it's not big enough, it's not bright enough or whatever. Do you showcase the right things that are the most important to you 1st? You advertise the offers that are just most important for your business or that you would like to sell more of more than the things that you would like to sell less off and things like that. So you can really discover your deficiencies there especially if you tested and then tweak it accordingly. So you should be able to see okay this is like my wish my goal, my ideal state. How far is the reality from that? Excellent. I guess there's probably some tools that you deal with too. I would imagine this of technology aside from just twitter and instagram, what types of technologies would you recommend? And are they budget friendly for the small business owner? Yeah. So I think google analytics is very fundamental. Everybody should have that installed on their site. You can see the behavior flow of your site, users and google analytics. So go through that and compare that to your ideal user flow, identify there's a specific path, a flow that a user follows within your site. And really look at the details, look at the screen, the pages, the functionalities, all interactions that people have and map that against the realities. You can identify some pages that have a huge drop off there so identify what you're doing wrong there. So that's really a great tool that will help you out so much when you want to improve your user experience on your website and then automation. I think it's a huge trend in digital marketing right now. That is important for right now and also for the future because you want to do less things manually because it's tedious to write everything down manually. Like you get a new phone call, you write it down or you have a manual list somewhere. People keep on forgetting it. Some employees are more reliable than others. Information can get lost and it can just give you false numbers and inaccurate insights. So the best way to really keep on top of everything and track everything is by having software do it for you instead of people. Software is a lot cheaper than paying a person as well. So you want to look into customer experience automation. A great tool that I recommend for that is active campaign. That way you can really track a lot of things and send marketing campaigns, right, email, why a text message via browsing notification, so many things to your customers and attracts your shopping cart abandonment rate, for example, and all those kind of things. So you can really tailor your marketing to your customers and you can see where your deficiencies are fixed those and have that taken care of by automation as well. Monique, this has been wonderful. So I guess if there are businesses out there, they're listening to us that maybe are thinking about growing, maybe they want to leave their business to their kids someday and they want to grow it to that point where they can do that. Maybe they're just stuck in a spot and they want to grow and scale a little bit more. Or they just feel like the digital side is deficient and they need social media, They need campaigns, they need to meet the buyer or wherever they are on whatever channel. I hope they give you a call at least to chat because I noticed on your website, you have a lot of free things on there. You have free downloads, things that they could think about, exercises that they could do for themselves. And also they can schedule time to do an initial chat with you. So I would hope they would go to Dragon Dash Digital dash marketing dot com and really contact the team there and I'm sure Monique would love to have you as a customer and maybe you'll find out more information than you didn't know about the digital side of the house. So Monique, I want to thank you very much for joining us today and I wish you the best of luck and please stay safe and stay healthy through this crazy type of ours. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. All right, thank you everyone. That's another episode of the science of C. X. I'm steve Pappas until the next time. Stay safe. Stay healthy and please take care. Finding one place to see all customer experience related tools for technology has been difficult until now. We just built it. Get ready for a science of C. X. Original customer experience technology has been helping to drive businesses by giving them insights into better methods to engage and delight their customers for some time now. But if you're looking for C. X. Tech you have to search far and why to understand the whole landscape. C. X. Stash is your simple one stop directory of all the Great Sea X related technology you need. It breaks down all C. X. By collections like analytics, Crm, journey mapping, voice of the customer, You X customer support and more. It's free to create an account and use no advertising. Cluttering up your experience. Just one place to find all the Great Sea X tech sign up today at www. Dot c x stash dot com.