How To Integrate Chatbots and More Into Your Business

How To Integrate Chatbots and More Into Your Business

Sean Boyle

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

10/15/2020

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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about it as a small business owner like me i rely on leads there's a good mentality called the 2 10 40 mentality in principle where every day you want to be talking to two prospects right every week you want to be talking to 10 and every month you want to be talking to 40. so i use that guideline of okay if i needed to meet that quota what am i going to do these are people that want my services and they want to talk to me so i want to make sure i can integrate and literally connect with them within a second i don't [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that has uh founded several startups and small businesses and grown them into seven and eight figure companies as well as the ceo and founder of miller i p law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and today we have another great guest on the podcast to do an expert episode um sean boyle and sean does a bit as a what i would say a marketing expert and we're going to hit on a few interesting topics everything from potentially at least or potentially hitting on chat bots and local seo or google ads and website building and a few things to be aware of as you're building a business and growing it so with that much is an introduction sean welcome to the podcast devon thank you so much man it's an absolute pleasure to be on and yeah just to give your audience a little background about myself i'm a serial entrepreneur just like you and i co-own a digital marketing company called momentum we do virtual tours digital marketing in general with web design ppc seo all that great stuff and i also host my own podcast the show and boyle podcast really all about human optimization whether we're talking physical or mental just optimizing you to the best uh person you can be so thanks so much for having me on man awesome well excited to have you on and talk a little bit more about marketing and a few ways for people to help position themselves so let's just dive right in so i listed off a few but maybe one that uh you know is i don't know controversial is quite the right word but one that is uncertain for people is the idea of chat bots right in the sense that i know you know when i go on a chat bot if i we are usually if it's a chat bot i sit there and if i can tell it's not a human on the other end i get turned off in the sense that half the time it doesn't really understand what i'm asking for it says here's a thought did this help you so give us a little bit of thought are chat bots worthwhile are they worth integrating are they a waste of time are they somewhere in the middle hell yeah they are absolutely worth integrating let me tell you something so when you go on facebook you go on all these big companies and you see the chatbot it you get turned off right because a they're not personalized to b they don't answer your question i mean how many times have you had to go on facebook you have something wrong with business manager right you go in their support and you can't find anybody you're just stuck to you know not talking to a human and it just doesn't work out so what we do with momentum with if you guys at home that are listening go to momentumvirtualtours.com right now what you'll see is when you go to the site you'll see my pretty face and it says hey you know this is sean here a real human how can i help you and you know devon the one thing that i strive to do is making it as personalized as possible because although you know i get a notification on my phone if people see oh this is an actual person that's like ready to rock and roll here then it makes it that much better you know i've had a lot of people a lot of clients that are wanting to integrate the software but i always tell them you know the technology is great it's fantastic because you can literally cut your balance rate and increase your closing rate by an exponential margin but if you're not having your face and you're not making it personalized then it's just going to be like any other chatbot man so so when you say personalized does that still mean that it's a machine learning or just a bot that has a rent or a response to certain keywords and you're still saying that or is it more of that hey it actually connects to a human being and they can answer questions to your phone or is it a combination of both yeah it's definitely a combination of both men so with the uh with the personalized setting with manychat are you familiar with manychat right i've heard of it not overly familiar with it so treat me as awesome dude this is so you've got to get this for your site um for your uh for your company it's incredible so it connects with facebook right so what happens is once someone comes to your site you actually get their name and the picture of them so you can connect with them not only on facebook but they see your profile as well so again it's just making it as personal as possible but the big thing that i will stress is if you're saying that there's a human on the other line you've got to make sure that there's a human you can't just lie and say oh yeah like we're going to let a robot take over because you got to think about it as a small business owner like me i rely on leads there's a good mentality called the 2 10 40 mentality in principle where every day you want to be talking to two prospects right every week you want to be talking to 10 and every month you want to be talking to 40. so i use that guideline of okay if i need to meet that quota what am i going to do these are people that want my services and they want to talk to me so i want to make sure i can integrate and literally connect with them within a second i don't care if i'm asleep or i'm you know i mean hopefully some of the most people have common courtesy to not hit me up at like 3am but you'll be surprised but uh during business hours you know i'm always on there if i'm in a meeting and i'm not saying hey give me five seconds i have to write this guy back real quick you know because they want to quote it's that simple it's that extra effort that i'm talking about man that just goes and speaks volumes and again closes more business for you at the end of the day so it's a tremendous thing man i can talk your ears off with this it's great and and i had to laugh because i had and so i don't we'll we'll slightly disagree on it not that it's not a good conversation in a sense i so the way we have ours we do have a chat system set up that it connects to all of our or some of the people in the offices phones right so if somebody asks a question it will be they do kind of a round robin where somebody available to chat for a few minutes and kind of a rule is hey if this doesn't look like it's a reasonable prospect or it's kind of not within our wheelhouse we don't spend a lot of time on it vice versa if they are wanting if they are a good prospect then we encourage them to set up an actual strategy session with them so we kind of have that set up but you know i have to laugh because one of the times that we were doing a chair somebody i was on the other line i was chatting with them and they were convinced i was a chat bot meaning i would say no i'm not a chat ball let me actually explain like and i'd answer like you know real person questions and they oh no i've seen these so many times i'm like no let me let me explain i'm a real person i'm actually answering your questions and so i had like a two-minute conversation convincing them that i wasn't a chat bot so this is an interesting aside dude that it happens sometimes people are skeptical and you know you try to convince them you try to talk to them in real human words and they're like no no this is definitely a chop app learning you know the ai technology is there this isn't really human all right so now we'll go off the less controversial topic so we talked a little bit about chat bots local seo first for those that don't know explain the difference between normal seo and local seo and kind of why why one matters or how you use them differently or how you position yourself sure so for the people listening at home and then watching and i wish i could actually draw a graph here but on this side we have seo which is uh we'll talk about the website right so you can do on-page seo you can do technical seo which is embedding keywords embedding uh metadata linking out that sort of thing local seo which is great for your and i kind of businesses where we rely on local based searches so what does that exactly look like you guys are at home and you have your phone google virtual tours in philadelphia my company momentum 360 comes up number one in that little three uh company snack pack they like to call them 90 and this is very crucial for your audience 90 nine zero percent of all searches go directly to that little snack pack with the three businesses right um and the reason that is is because they're the top three google prioritizes that because google thinks oh these are the most legitimate companies based off of the proximity and based off of you know what they're doing google's main thing is they want to make sure they're answering the question so if you put in a prominent keyword search like lawyers and ex or you know law companies and x you know they want to find you in the best way possible right so to do that and it's very simple i i preached evan on you know actionable tactics and this is an actionable tactic someone who's just driving home and they don't know a thing about us you know they could they could take it so google my business is the number one factor uh for local seo right if you don't have a google my business for your company you want to go online and create that free profile optimize it and you know once you optimize it you can start posting products you can start posting your website all this stuff right you want to get more reviews that's number one number two is you want to build out so uh social bookmarks in local citations so what does that look like that's talking about you know your mazes of the world your um facebooks of course twitter those are social bookmarks uh what's a local one i mean yelp you know we know everyone knows yalpa um you know and just stacking up all like super pages you know all of those citations because google cares about three things with local seo name address phone number it's called the nap right so you want to have that consistent across the board if it's consistent across the board what that's going to mean is your uh platform is going to um be entitled as legitimate or as more legitimate because they think oh they have the same kind of information across the board so we're going to rank them higher because they're more priority we they're more of an authority figure uh just based off of that it's just all legitimacy thing um and then the third thing uh kind of just finishing up is um obviously getting started with uh with social media if you haven't yet and um writing content you know content's king so those three actionable tactics man with local seo it's um it's very very important so if you're to take the number one tops or you know people that are or don't have the budget or the ability to hire a marketing company right now they want to get going on something what would be the best thing they could do to get started with local seo make that gmb like i just said you know go through that top three priority make your google my business make those social bookmarks and citations and create your social media profiles your instagrams in the world twitter linkedin business accounts i'm talking right um and then also with social bookmarks as well so uh well i just touched on that but like um citations so and this is all free this is all free stuff it's not you know it's not stuff that you have to continually pay for you know one question on that in in one eye i haven't or don't know so interesting to me sure so i go out and make my facebook i make my instagram i make my twitter all the top social you know bookmarks type of a thing do i need to be active in order to continue to rank better meaning you know because i'm my guess is and i'll put at least me you know my situation is i don't know that i always want to be active across all the platforms meaning i don't use twitter much i've never really understood it i know other people love it i'm not a huge twitter person so if i is it better for me at least to create the profile when i never use it or is there a drawback to doing that and then having what would be kind of a dormant or less active one or get maybe thoughts on that so here's the thing man i mean you know i'm not saying you're making excuses at all but with with twitter and all these things you need to post you know people love content so in my opinion i'll tell you a quick story when i was first getting started we had zero accounts across the board i was like i am not a social media savvy person at the core of me i am not that person i'm color blind i don't know if you knew that but um i'm red green color blind so design it's just not my forte right so what i did was i took my weaknesses and i put that off to somebody else who did specialize in that okay so if you have someone at your company or you can hire on fiverr a social media manager for like ten bucks um for for an entire week or uh like a hundred bucks for the for the month um that's what i used to do and so i took that over so we could hire it in house but you need to be posting um adequate content so what does that look like on linkedin you got to know your target audience you know you got to post more professional stuff instagram facebook you can be a little more loosey-goosey twitter you know be a little more relaxed in that but the biggest thing is providing value so what we do i mean i don't want to harp on my company too much i'll actually tell you what one of our clients did that we were able to help them do easy pickings they're a women's retail shop jersey philadelphia and new york right they have like 30 shops richard warsack shout out to him one of the best owners i've ever met my life i mean this guy's awesome and uh he's one of these guys where he was struggling with the socials too so what i told him was hey you need to post products of your great um stores so we started posting uh you know blouses women's clothes kind of stuff i don't know i think about of course but um we started posting we started pushing the shoes and we started using these these hashtags especially on instagram instagram is a great place for just photos and general content so if you don't necessarily want to write a long form thing on linkedin or a nice tweet on twitter or facebook instagram is that place and it's a great place because it has a domain authority of a hundred so it's going to look great in the eyes of google and once you start to get more followers more followers and the more likes and traction that's all stuff that google takes into consideration so if you're thinking at home right now man my business is my instagram and social media game isn't up the par take an audit of it and it's free you know you can say hey we're not doing this and you you people they're not you know growing up they're not posting content um that's not it's really important that you know you're there's always a way to tell a different matter the medium you know i i don't use tick tock that much but there's definitely a way you know there's definitely i'm going to so i'm going to hold your feet to fire up so my original question was and i i i certainly get the merits of doing social media and being active posting both so that you have followers so you have consistent so people actually check you out but if i'm if i'm more active on those websites does it affect the local seo or does it have much of an effect and that was kind of the the genesis of the question right yeah i want to open a tangent there yes it does affect it it does you think and from all these metrics like i was saying with followers and likes those metrics taking a google takes into consideration for ranking higher obviously the more followers you have the more um accessible your keywords are going to be so for easy pickins for that shop in new york jersey and philly if someone was to google women's blouses or women's uh shoes right whatever they were gonna google we rank a little bit higher than we did because we grew our follower base i think we have like 10 000 followers on instagram and that um following it definitely helps 100 all right so now we're going to jump over to and that was certainly very helpful so thank you and interesting uh how to start ranking locally and it certainly seems like for a lot of businesses that's where things are moving especially if you're having people that are going to be you know if you're e-commerce and you sell to everybody maybe not quite as interest you know quite as important but certainly if you have any sort of physical presence any sort of location where people either want to come to your office or even just looking for someone local that one certainly has a big effect so now going over to google adwords and google adwords again is a bit i don't know controversial i keep saying the word confront i probably should come up with a better word but you know so you take google adwords and some businesses love it they you know live it die by it they generate a lot of you know a lot of business they have a lot of success and other people say hey i hate google adwords i dumped a whole bunch of money into it seems like i'm not having getting hardly any referrals and i'm sure you know and it seems like it can be either a great referral source and a great source of business or it can be a huge money pit so first of all thoughts on that is it is are both sides true is it depending on the business is it just some people don't know how to run their ads is it they're not looking in the right spot or thoughts on google ads so love them in general right we launched a new ad campaign dev that we already met our roi and it's what seven days into the month right so for us we know how to run ads i mean my business partner used to work at google and google and facebook their ad algorithm and their features are kind of similar so we can you know implement those certain tactics but where people get caught up is you know i think they're they're not spending in the correct margins so let me touch on that for a second let's say we have a hundred dollars to spend it right and we're trying to get you new acquisitions for your company right so we bid on certain keywords what people and again this is the biggest thing is they they lack on the targeting they lack on how much money is you know uh adequate to different parts of the campaign so in a general sense yes people are i would say on average less informed than people who are trained at google and all this kind of stuff so ultimately how do you become better at google ads a lot of people that i know if there's oh just do it and then waste a bunch of money and that's not what i'm going to say what i can say is and this is actually a great testament to my business partner mac um is we're actually launching a course that uh is going to be talking primarily about uh how to build up your digital presence with advertisement and you know if you want more so of uh you know increased uh roi with that that's that's more so free that you don't necessarily pay for you can go on youtube and you can just do a bunch of research i mean youtube and google have been my saving graces where i've had learned so much for myself about exactly how much money to adequate how much you know do you need to go so the big thing is is education and i definitely preach that because it's it's a great tool if you know how to use it um and like i'll just jump into that so taking let's say you take a startup or small business they don't have right now they would love to have a mark or a budget to hire a marketer or a marketing firm or to put some money into that they're saying hey we're just getting started whether it's a side hustle or we just have a little bit of money and so they're saying hey we're too price sensitive we don't have the money if in that situation what's the best resource or what's the best way to get started or should they not get started put that money elsewhere and wait till they have it or kind of what's the best tip for them and somebody in that situation yeah the latter i was just going to add on to that so i wouldn't even recommend google ads at that point right i would recommend seo first i would recommend local seo because what is that that's a foundation a base not only that's free but you're getting concrete organic rankings that you're not paying for you know what i'm saying so it's just the analogy is you know it's it's rather getting concrete likes and concrete followers rather than just buying them right rather just buying likes that's really is and and believe it or not sure people could say oh we get a lot more business um with ads in my case in my point of view for our business model and for a lot of our clients seo gets a majority of the business and once you have a certain surplus that you would like to spend on ads yes then i would recommend you diving into those angles but for someone you're just starting out or someone who's you know just trying to cut back on money look at your seo first is there anything that you could be doing better there think about that and again this is just me as a business owner trying to you know bootstrap and save money and provide a lot of value man so google ads they're not the they're not the ultimate answer you know i i would think that there's other tools out there like local seo like i talked about earlier that would be better starting off than those google ads 100 okay so and the question on that maybe to follow up so you take seo you know my experience and it can be completely wrong is seo is a bit of a slow burn in the sense you're not going to go and put out some content and the next day you're gonna rank number one on google you have to put in the time in order to be active on your website do whether it's a blog or at least blog or other content and actually give a reason for google and for people to come to your website so any is that first of all is that true is it a slower born or a slower burn or a longer build or is there any shortcuts so to speak and you know shortcuts always make it sound like you're not doing something right but is there any ways to get that kicked off if you're saying hey right now we don't have the money to do google adwords we should focus on seo what what how should they do it so they're not looking at such a long and protracted time of frame it's a great question it's a question dev that i got asked a lot so for people listening out there that don't have a blog our blog has been so beneficial in so many ways it's connected us more importantly for me with networks and just a whole bunch of people but what i would recommend what i would recommend people do is start that blog and go on these free sites like ubersuggest.com go on google trends and type in what people are searching for so kind of reverse engineer i want to write a blog i need to find out the title of the blog that people are searching for so when people google law in x or virtual tours in x or any kind of niche right then you're going to be able to rank for that i'll tell you an example we found that a considerable of people who want to do virtual tours all across the board real estate retail commercial whatever industry they're googling how much these things cost right so we made a blog how much do virtual tours cost that blog man has got us so much business so many views it's like we we have the like so for for the people out there for um and this is another great tool google search console which is a free tool it's like uh google analytics but um you can actually index your site and we'll have to talk about this in on another episode because it's it's really really technical but um what you get man is you know your base of okay these are the how many people reached your home page this is how many people reached all the other pages our blog reaches if we let's say we got you know a thousand visitors to the website um 750 of them are to the home page the other 250 man are from the blog so it's a great way to spark up some quick interest because if you can get a blog that's ranking well um and you can just google for the audience listening how do you write a good seo optimized blog you can just google that right um the the tricks and tactics are already out there i don't want to reiterate that it's very easy to just go and google that um but once you have that blog post on the website optimize it and then you're like you said it's a slow burner i completely agree with that but it's a more uh it's a snowball effect right you're pushing that rock up the mountain and then before you know it you're going to be going down the other slope and sliding down and getting a lot of business so google ads is one you know i i guess if you're doing it for a limited time a short burst of some quick engagement seo is a bigger long-term play where you're going to just see your your web impressions and your overall clicks increase as well as your brand so that's why i definitely recommend seo because it's more of a concrete tactic that's going to be around um and it's more passive too for sure so uh but but it's really exciting i mean i love the debate oh ads versus seo but in my opinion man seo all day okay no i think that that's that that would be i think that if you're willing to invest the longer term because the the thing with ads is is day you turn it off the day is the flow starts going so even if you were to get a good ad that's built up as soon as you stop paying google you're no longer ranking there and you're no longer there and so if you can build up a good seo presence and just a good website presence and that can be one where you're not having to pay for ever and ever and you're not always have you're not tied to and linked to it is nearly as much so i think that make it resonates at least with me so for sure man excuse me so last couple questions and then you know certainly never have enough time to talk about all the topics website build website building and brand awareness so any thoughts on those any how how should people tackle kind of i would say brand awareness online or to or any other tips that we haven't gone over as to how they should start to tackle that so the people out there that haven't started up their own website what i would recommend is wordpress wordpress is a little more expensive but you're getting so much more right you have websites builders like your squarespaces your wixes of the world godaddy you can make a godaddy website but the thing is you can't optimize technically as much as you can with wordpress so wordpress is an investment just like any website is an investment right and your domain um that's important too you know like i bought trumboyle.com for like two grand last week and i didn't want to pay 2 grand for it but you got to think there's a million sean boyles out there i have a very generic irish name so it is what it is you know it's um it's what i have to do uh to make my nut and grow so i would say to the people out there that are looking to get that website wordpress 100 and then map around it for brand awareness you need to put in your social media links on your website you need to put in you know a blog you need to put in all these you know specific pages your service pages your your frequently asked questions your meet the team pages um about paige obviously contact so what i'm saying is there's so many different pages we're still coming up with pages right now so the the main idea man is content never stops the the moment that you say you know what we just want to hold off on content for a little bit that's when you're going to start the client sure there's a lot of people out there that and kind of like our business too where we're you know we we can kind of rely on a couple blogs but if you're just starting out you need to you know because again it's like tick tock or any video one video you'll you'll go viral right so you need to make that one video one blog whatever you think is gonna um you know produce some pretty good results in terms of ranking like we were talking about earlier and post that to the website and then making your website as fast as possible man so and that's a huge one too because people are just starting out they want to add on all these plugins and all these graphics and stuff but the website's 13 seconds to load and if it's 13 seconds to load no one's going to go there you're going to get a high bounce rate and you're not going to have any website visitors so last last bonus question then we'll have to have maybe a follow-up conversation about some other day urls you know you can pay a whole bunch of them or you can pay a little for them and usually the shorter url or the one that's more catchy is going to be the one that you pay more right so if it's a few characters or a few letters and you're gonna pay more if it's you know five words string together nobody's gonna remember how to spell it so question would be to you is is are shorter urls as as crucial as they used to be right in the in give you a bit of context my question in the sense that you know used to be internet first started out you didn't have google or you didn't have you know bing or whichever uh one you use i think most people use google but um you know you had to remember so you had to remember nike.com where you had to remember amazon.com or whatnot and you had to remember the locations otherwise you couldn't get to them and or you go use some sort of a directory nowadays you know it seems like if i go and i'm looking for company i so i googled their name right so miller i p law rather than remembering whatever the url is i'm going to just go google miller ip law see which one i think it is and click on there so it's a short url or a url in general worth investing in does it make sense or is it kind of now taking a back burner given that really what you're looking for is search results well what you want to do for the home page which is your your url on your core url you want to make it your name so milleriplaw.com you know that's that's ideal um momentumvirtualtours.com right sean boyle.com you know devonmiller.com making it as specific as possible for people to find you is key now for blogs which i'll touch on is a little bonus you want to make more so long-term keywords right because those long-term keywords although people aren't searching as much they're very easy to get number one in on the first page and second page on so um but we'll have to save that for another episode but uh yeah definitely short urls for sure now the question i'll follow up with a question so let's say because short shorter urls if a lot of them are now taken right it's hard to find miller is a very common last name i can't i actually look and it is technically available they want i think it was for miller.com they wanted 200 000 at least and for patins.com they want 2 million or 2 million dollars i don't have the money to spend on either of those but if i even if i did i don't know that would be the money i'd spend it but if you say you know get a shorter url you know it can make it a little bit easier catchy or i can go do one of a number other things to place your money how important is it to get a shorter url meaning should i really worry about it or should i try and get the best when i can and move on does that make sense yeah i understand there definitely is some give and take and for your case what about miller um miller patents you know that could be one i would think you know again this is all your budget if you have money to blow on on a domain and again this is a this is an investment at the end of the day so if you can afford a higher url not 200k or 2 million i i definitely can't afford that nor do i think i'll ever be able to afford that up for a url but um you definitely it's a case by case basis for sure knowing your industry knowing what people are going to search and again using google trends using ubersuggest.com which are great free tools you can find out all that information and it's great because you could save a lot of money and um you don't have to be a complete idiot and you go maniac like me to just buy my domain name for two grand which i should have bought it for like 500 bucks but we'll save that for another day you know no and i think that and i'd agree and one thing that i have found this is kind of my thoughts or feedback is you know some of the times i found is i usually if as a client or a customer that they're already either going to know where we're at they're going to get an email they're going to find in the signature blog but if you know where i found honestly that if i'm on a podcast or i'm on somewhere where i'm actually saying the url or trying to get people to remember it then it seems to come into even more of a play because now i am asking them to remember it and if it's you know as an example a couple of the ones that we use is freestrategymeeting.com and that one's one that we everybody that wants to sign up for strategies or meeting or strategy session we can say you know i on a podcast and say go to freestrategymeeting.com and grab some time with us and i also got meetdevin.com which is now come meet devin i can't get devin devon was apparently too broad or too uh too popular but if you go to medevin.com and i say now you know how do you reach out to me we'll go to medevin.com so i found that it does seem like you know it's certainly for some situations if you're trying to get people to remember it if you're trying to say it over it you don't want to have to spell it out you don't want them to misspell it certainly seems to play into that and you're 100 right man those are great these are great urls for for what you're looking to do for sure all right well as we wrap up never have enough or never have enough time to hit all the topics but if people want to reach out to you they want to use your services they want to find out more or they want to be your friend or any or all of the above what's the best way to connect up with you yeah man so you can go to sean boyle.com that's my main website and then you can also go to sean boyle m amazon michael on instagram and follow me send me a dm say hey i loved your episode um and then we'll just connect on there but uh devon thank you so much for having me on man this is great hey it's been a pleasure fun to have you on now for those of you that are listening if you got two different options if you're an expert like shawn is and you'd like to come on and share your expertise you can go to inventiveexpert.com and if your normal guest that just wants to tell your journey feel free to go to inventivejourneyguest.com to apply to be on the office or to apply to be on the podcast if you are a listener make sure to click subscribe so you get notifications on all the new episodes that are coming out and lastly if you ever need any help with patents or trademarks feel free to reach out to us and we're always here to help thanks again sean been fun been a pleasure and appreciate coming on absolutely brother talk soon you English (auto-generated) All Sales Recently uploaded