Bradley Benner, SEO Consultant, Co-Founder, Semantic Mastery
Bradley Benner, co-founder and senior partner at Semantic Mastery, is a self- proclaimed digital marketing addict. After 12 years of working as an electrical contractor and communications technician, Bradley left the technical trades industry to launch a real estate investing business, where he learned the importance of effective marketing and immersed himself in studying the art and science of marketing. Since then, he has been directly involved with marketing for industries like real estate, mortgage lending, service contractors, and night club/event promotions.
https://semanticmastery.com/sus
https://semanticmastery.com/hdquestions
https://semanticmastery.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleybenner/
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldtl. I'm your host and our guest today is Bradley Benner and he is a co-founder of Semantic Mastery. He's an entrepreneur, business owner. We're gonna find out a little bit about his entrepreneurial journey, how he's grown and scaled his business. And then the work that he does with marketing professionals and the services he provides, he's has a really interesting niche in the marketing space based on their expertise. What they do is providing it as a service to other marketing professionals. We're gonna learn about that with that. Bradley, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Bruce. So I was like to start with learning a little bit more about backgrounds and how people got into the businesses they're in. So tell us a little bit about how you got into marketing. What was your professional journey that got you to where you are today?
[00:01:40] Okay, sure. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I've I've have a technical background. I was an electrician. You know, I studied and went to vocational school and high school and basically became a certified electrician right outside of high school and worked doing electrical work and then eventually moved into doing communications work for Verizons.
[00:01:56] So telephone company work in was doing quite well, but I got kind of bored and seen that there wasn't a lot of opportunity and that the craft section of that type of a of a business to grow and to get beyond a certain point. And so back in 2003 or so, when real estate was really hot, I decided to dabble in real estate. You know, and now a lot of people did.
[00:02:18] And at that point, really, if you touched real estate, you made money. And so I was very young at the time was about twenty three. And I started flipping houses kind of on the side side. Yeah. And I did really well. So within the first four to six weeks, I actually put my notice in advertising and decided to go full time into the real estate business. And that's really where I started to learn about marketing was, you know, because I was from a technical background, I really had no reason to know marketing. But because of the real estate, I started learning about, you know, copywriting and graphic design to create postcards and ads and things like that. And so I really enjoyed marketing. I kind of fell in love with it.
[00:02:53] But fast forward a few years, 2007. I'm waiting for this one. I'm sure you know it when I'm about to tell you here. But in 2007, you know, the bubble burst in real estate.
[00:03:03] And I was in. I had because of my construction background, I had actually gotten into doing full on, you know, rehab renovations of houses. And three I had three projects going on where the aftermarket, after repaired value of the property, fell below what I had actually acquired it for. And yeah, and I had tens of thousands of dollars worth of construction left to do and each one of the properties. So I literally had to walk away. I went back that my business went bankrupt. And so I went back into you know, I hung on until about 2008. But really, I was I was just hanging on. I didn't want to go. So by by 2008, I went back in to do an electrical work and I started my own contracting business. So I was doing mainly residential type remodel work and it was good. But, you know, again, I don't think I was cut out to be just in, you know, pulling wire and climbing ladders. You know, I always wanted something more. So I started looking at how to grow my own electrical contracting business. And I was doing some traditional marketing stuff that I had learned when I was doing real estate, but I wasn't really getting the leads that I wanted. So around 2000 nine, right around the beginning of 2010, I started looking around to figure out what I could do to get better results, generate more leads from my own business. And I started looking at search engine optimization. Like I said, well, let me check out this thing. Google, right. So there's a long time ago. But, you know, I started looking at like, well, how do I get a presence found in a search engine? And so I started studying Tessio. And honestly, I fell in love with that. I became fascinated with the ability to manipulate Google search. And so I started building. I built my own Web site, obviously allowed to learn WordPress and all this other stuff. And I built my own work Web site.
[00:04:39] It was horrid, but it was a start. I'm going to go back to the Wayback Machine and find it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:45] And so and then I started looking at, you know, because I again, I was in the construction industry. I knew a lot of other contractors. And so I built a couple of other contractor type Web sites. And just to I had different like guinea pigs, a testing grounds essentially to try different things, to see what I could get to work. And so I really started off with three Web sites and within it took about six months to get any results out of any of them. But I was able to duplicate like number one, search rankings for all three of those sites in about six months. And the calls started coming in for my own Web site. But as well as the other two testing sites was a carpet cleaning site. And another one was. Locksmiths and I started and I didn't even have a contractor for those sites. They were just like testing sites. So generating leads. Exactly. And so that's when I thought about it. I was like, you know, I'm on to something here if I can generate leads for other. And at the time, I was only focused on contractors, but I said if I could generate leads for other contractors, I could turn that into a business and then I wouldn't have to pull wire and climb ladders anymore, you know? And so I ended up contacting several carpet cleaning companies and found one that was willing to just at the time just lease the site from me on a monthly basis, no matter how many calls they got.
[00:05:54] Locksmithing was something similar to that. But then I started building other you know, I started actually talking with some of the contractors that I worked with or that I knew from out in the field and saying, hey, look, I can generate leads for you. Would you be interested? And started negotiating different types of arrangements. Sometimes it was a, you know, flat monthly fee to lease the site. Other times it was on a pay per lead basis, which and then there was all even some where I would get what I call equity share, where sometimes I would get a percentage of any lead that closed and turned into, you know, a relative or like a share. Like a revenue share. Yeah. And in fact, I still do that today with some of my best lead generation service providers. And so, you know, over the course of about from 2010 to 2012, I had started to build up this portfolio of lead generation sites, which was great because they were my digital assets.
[00:06:41] I owned them. They weren't the ones that were for hire. Yeah, it is correct. But I live in Virginia and this is I was dealing mainly with contractors. We have, you know, a pretty good winter season and that typically slows a lot of contracting type work down. And so I went through two years of the winter season. My revenue would drop significantly. And so by 2012, I had decided that I wanted to open up a local marketing agency so that I could provide services on more of a traditional like monthly retainer basis and kind of stabilized my revenue. By that time, I had a portfolio of lead generation sites that I could point to as proof that I knew what I was doing. So I opened up Big Bamboo Marketing LLC, which is my my own agency. I'm really more of a consultant and I've got some outsourcing teams. But, you know, I'm able to fulfill local search engine optimization, content marketing, social media paperclip. You know, all that kind of stuff for a number of clients. And again, I my focus has always been primarily on contractors, although I do have clients in other industries.
[00:07:41] And so in 2012, like I said, I had and I started to tell you this before we started this call. Yeah. I was doing everything at that point on my own, like 100 percent on my own. And although I was good at it and I enjoyed it and I was making really good money, I was working 12 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. And I loved it. But I hit a point where I could not take on anymore work. There just wasn't enough hours in the day. Yeah. And so I had actually joined, well, high level mastermind, marketing mastermind with other marketing professionals. And we were you know, it was essentially like once a month there would be a webinar and there was a forum where we could all chat and stuff like that.
[00:08:21] And so I started a weekly accountability group via a Google Hangout. So we would just get on a live what, you know, a video conference call essentially with whoever wanted to join in on a weekly basis and just share what was working, what wasn't working.
[00:08:35] You know, different methods on sales and SEO and all these different kinds of things. And over the course of a few weeks, I had really developed a relationship with four other four of the others that would show up on my accountability group meetings. So we had an audience. We had thirty thirty twenty five to thirty five people showing up on a weekly basis, but only four or five of us were contributing weekly and everybody else just there to listen. And so we decided at that point that we were probably missing out. We had an opportunity to create a business out of it and share our expertise as a kind of a group because we each owned our own separate marketing companies. But we would get together and just share all this information. And so that's where we created Semantic Mastery, which is my coaching and consulting company and where we also provide done for you marketing services to get back to being at the glass ceiling essentially saturated. What was interesting was once I got hooked up with my partners, we weren't semantic mastery at the time, but we were just getting together on a weekly basis. I had an opportunity presented to me to go to a really high level search engine optimization seminar for a week and it was a three day deal and it cost 20 grand to go to the scene. Yeah, and you know, just north of Phoenix. Anyways, so I went ahead and paid to go to that because I wanted to learn, you know, I wanted to sharpen my skills even more theoretical.
[00:09:50] But like I said, I was unable to really even take on anymore work. So what was very interesting was on I bought a Kindle book or a book on Kindle called Work The System by Sam Carpenter. And it was nine dollars. I bought this book and I've read half of it on the flight out the Phoenix and I read the other half on the way back. And it was all about how to delegate work and how to get the hell out of your own way so that you could scale your business, whatever business you're in. And I got more out of that $9 book than I did the twenty thousand dollar event that I went to. So I had a and it was interesting because I got back from that and I learned how, you know, I decided that I. Up until that point, I'd always thought nobody could do what I do as good as I do it right. And I think that's kind of probably a less a mindset than a lot of entrepreneurs. Yeah. And and I realized that once I read this book that I you know, honestly, I was my bottleneck. And in order to really scam my business, I needed to get get out of my own way. And so it taught me how to develop what they called working procedures.
[00:10:49] But essentially, your standard operating procedures for all the different tasks or, you know, the different methods and things that I would do within my business to go up to provoke, to get results. So I learned I started learning how to develop process docs and I would just use Google Docs and I would do screen cast recordings with, you know, screen cast recorder and essentially narrate all of the steps. And then I would go back and basically transcribe them into step by step linear fashion notes that would be within a Google doc. And then I it took me three months to get my first set of process docs created for a something that I was building which were called syndication networks anyways. It's a very complex process, but it took me three months, but I got it all put together in a very logical way. And then I was able to hire. I was only looking to hire one virtual assistant, but I ended up hiring to right off the bat full time to start building these networks which like freed up so much time for me. And interestingly, once I had built out that this process docs and hired those two virtual assistants, they were able to go through it and learn it so quickly without much hand-holding at all that that was the first prop.
[00:11:55] We ended up turning that into the first information product that we launched underneath the semantic mastery brand to teach other marketers how to build these networks because they were so powerful for us, you know. And so that's really I mean, that's really how I came about. And since that point was my own agency, big bamboo marketing, I've kept that small intentionally because we've kind of grown to semantic mastery side of things. I mean, I enjoy called coaching and consulting, but a lot of the stuff that we teach about the different methods that we use for SVO and content marketing and such, we have also built teams that can fulfill those services. And all of those teams have been trained by the exact same process docs that I started to learn how to do back in 2013. Through that, you know, and now we've got close to 40 employees. So.
[00:12:40] I'm curious how like how did you choose what to start with? I mean, given all the things, all the activities that you were you were personally working on. How did you pick which thing to write your first playbook around and hire your first set of virtual assistants around? Like what was what was that process like or how did you make that decision at the time?
[00:12:59] It was really just because one of the biggest moneymakers for me, but also the most time consuming things, was building these syndication networks to help with SEO and content amplification and that kind of stuff. And I had a pretty good business where I was reselling them to clients. I was also selling them kind of had wholesale to other SEO agencies. So I was building them all 100 percent myself. So it was very time consuming. You would take me even though I got pretty efficient at it. It would take me five to six hours to build one network. And so, you know, that was really my criteria was I wanted to unload that from my plate to free up all those all that time because I was spending, you know, 30, 40 hours a week just building those networks. Then I still had to do all of the other client stuff like fulfillment and, you know, managing clients and everything else. So I wanted to free that time up. But since then, what I've always learned and this is what I always try to recommend to our students and members of our groups and such, is that one of the first things I would recommend outsourcing to anybody is the stuff that you just either repetitive tasks or things that you dislike to do, because come on.
[00:14:00] I mean, think about it. All of us in business have a lot a ton of stuff on our plate that we don't enjoy doing. And you know, why be an entrepreneur and own your business if you don't get to work on the things that you truly enjoy?
[00:14:11] Delegate all the others other that is the one that always surprises me is that people, you know, they control everything and their own their companies. I mean, they are masters of their domain. And they they still, for whatever reason, choose to do things that they just don't like doing. And even if it's not a huge time, sink the emotional, you know, tax that you pay and stuff like hire somebody to do it, like it's going to free up, you know, whereas it may not free up a huge amount of time. It's going to free up so much energy and so much positivity. And then and then it's just going to reinforce the process. Right. So if you if you successfully delegate something you hate doing, like you're you're just gonna be on fire. Start looking for the next thing you hate doing it. Like get off my plate.
[00:14:50] Yeah. And I mean, like you said, as you know, I know I'll procrastinate on stuff that I don't want to do until last minute and then I feel rush to do it. And you're right. It's just an emotion. It's an emotional mental drain. But it's something else that I found that was very, very interesting was once I learned how to create process docs and train somebody else to do do what I was doing, because that they would essentially be doing that whatever task over and over and over again, they would usually get more efficient at it than I did because I was doing everything and spreading myself thin across all these different. You know, I had to wear all these different hats and everything else, whereas once I train an assistant or an employee or whatever to do a specific task and they repeat it over and over again, they get very, very good at it. And something else that I learned how to do was when I first started training, creating process docs and everything, when I began, it was the control freak in me. I would give the process doc to an assistant and say, follow this to a T. Don't DDA, don't change it. Don't anything, because I thought it was the best that it could be. But over the years, I've learned to empower my assistant to say to try to find ways to make it better and improve the process and come back to me. And I just tell them, like, look, here's the process. Start doing this. If you find ways, tools, apps, anything that can help you to streamline the process, make it more efficient to improve it. Just let me know. Run it by me. And if I approve it, then you can actually edit the process, doc, to include that. And what happens is now they've got they've got skin in the game. Right? They feel like they're contributing and it allows them to grow. And it also makes everything more efficient on our end.
[00:16:20] Yeah. Yeah. The two things I've learned about this process over time. One is now I do the screen recording, so I do a screen capture. I walk through that, know all, I'll do the process, I'll do a screen grab or a video recording. And then I give it to them and I have them create the playbook or the Google doc because I want them I want them to have to pull out of the video, the steps and the checkpoints and the little things.
[00:16:43] And then I can get to review it and I get to see, oh, what did they notice? And oftentimes they're capturing steps that I didn't even realize I was doing or don't. Sharona Yeah, so that one and then the other one is when we do our weekly call around it. We do tracking. We track changes on the document and I'm expecting them to have made changes like they have to come to the table every week with things that they've done to improve the process. So things that they've added, ways they have, you know, new tools that they've incorporated into, as I expect a certain amount of process improvement and they have to be responsible for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:13] And once again, it was just about giving up that control and it's so hard to do. But once you do, it really does like it starts to open up your eyes to how much opportunity cost you've you you've expended by not, you know, when you're always trying to control everything.
[00:17:27] I'm curious, just kind of going back to your story a little bit. Anything that you took away from the flipping houses kind of experience that you've been able to apply to the to the work, to the businesses that you're working on now, either just turn on general principles, approaches, mindset, philosophy, business model itself. I mean, what's that? You've been entrepreneur. All right. A couple of times now. What's. Yeah. You know, what are some of your bigger takeaways, lessons learned?
[00:17:49] Well, I would say number one is consistency in all areas of the business. In other words, like for marketing, especially continuously marketing. So when I was running the real estate business, you know, I would go through kind of peaks and valleys where I would go on a marketing blitz and I would, you know, try to get a bunch of leads to come in. And a bunch of leads would come in and I would stop marketing so I could process the lead leg up to do the window. Yeah. And then what? So once I would get done processing all the leads, then there would be that lag or delay between us, you know, because I'd have to start up another marketing campaign. So there's always peaks and valleys. And I've learned over the years, you know, for example, to transition to my agency like same type of thing. If I would go prospecting, doing outbound marketing to try to acquire new clients for Mark, my marketing agency, I would go through peaks and valleys.
[00:18:33] So I've just learned over the years to stay consistent. Right. Yeah. Built built a process for your marketing and your prospecting and delegate that so that you constantly have leads coming in, even if it's not a big, you know, a bucket full of leads that drops in your lap. It's OK to have a smaller number of leads coming in. But consistently because you always have your pipeline full then. And that's something that I think is very, very important.
[00:18:57] And I think so many I mean, particularly service based businesses, you know, get in that feast and famine cycle where they get, you know, they're not working all. So they ramp up networking and sales and marketing and they generate leads and then they have a bunch of work and then they have to do the work. And then the three months goes by. And now they don't have now they're out of a job.
[00:19:14] They don't anything in the pipeline. Yeah. I think that that I would say that, you know, the busier you are, the more you need to sell. Right. Because it's just it is. Otherwise you're gonna see the only way to combat that. That's right. And and cycle that you get right. So in terms of how you've kind of chosen your strategy, I mean, the one thing that I find really interesting about your work is that you've gone from being kind of the front end service provider to being kind of the back office to other marketing agencies are marketing companies. How, I guess how did you make that decision or what? Tell me about that. You know, from a strategy process, from a business model. When did you make that? Why did you make that decision? Sharon and I never I never planned it.
[00:19:51] There was kind of. And I think, again, I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs can relate. We get into a particular business and we just. Opportunity presents itself. And you kind of you follow that path.
[00:20:00] And that's what happened with the semantic masteries when we started teaching the methods that we're working for. Each one of our own businesses. And that's one of the things that I think separates us from a lot of other Internet marketing type coaching, you know, information product type businesses.
[00:20:15] I think a lot of those businesses and I'm not going to name any names or putting body down, but I've seen a lot of. They gets sold that teach a specific method that I don't know that they're actually using in real life. It's just mainly theory. And what we've always done, my partners and I, because we each own our our own agencies outside of what we're doing for semantic mastery is we have clients to be accountable to. So the things that we teach our real-world methods. And so when we started teaching these methods, you know, some of the training programs are very complex. They go through, you know, their long day because there's a lot of steps that have to be implemented in certain order and that kind of stuff. And. But they work the processes work as long as you implement them fully. And so what we found from our students and the purchases of our training courses would they would go through the training almost like they would just consume it, but not put it into action. And when we would follow up with them to say you could survey and ask them, you know, how's it come in? You've been applying to strategies a lot of times. They say all the training is great, but it's just too much work.
[00:21:15] Can you do it for us? And we heard that over and over and over again. And so that's when we said, you know, instead of us constantly just generating training products, we ought to develop done for use services around our specific methods so that our students, you know. So essentially, let's put it this way, our front end really is our training products now.
[00:21:34] And that that actually leads people to the back end, which is where they purchase that done for you products, which is great because that's something that they purchase over and over and over again as opposed to a training product that you purchase one time and you're done with it, you know.
[00:21:46] Now and how. I mean, I guess as you look at growing and scaling the business, where I mean, where where are your expansion opportunities? Are you just looking to build build it to more marketing company is in new geographies and just kind of extending the reach there, other new kind of products and service you can add. Are there other kinds of companies that you can provide or other types of professional services that you could provide these kind of solutions to what's here? I'm curious what your growth strategy is.
[00:22:11] Yeah, that's part of the reason I'm on this podcast is honestly.
[00:22:15] Yeah, because we have catered primarily to marketing consultants and want to be agencies and, you know, or even agencies in that kind of stuff. And that's that's fine. But we've been trying to expand outside of that to to reach the more broader business audience, business owner audience. In other words, people that own their own businesses that want to either do their own marketing, you know, which again, I don't recommend because as we just talked about, I think it's better to delegate. But what about the businesses that have in-house marketing staff? Right. Something like that. So that's something we've been trying to do, is kind of branch out a little bit broader because whether it's the training or the done for new services, in either case, you know, it could help a business owner to not have to pay a marketing agency an exorbitant amount of money because they could do it in-house and still get similar results if they just had the proper training and resources available.
[00:23:01] So this is this is like a dentist or a lawyer or like who would be a typical client for for you in that model?
[00:23:11] Yeah, pretty much what you just mentioned to a local business. And it doesn't have to be a local business. I mean, we've got, you know, obviously people using our methods that have like e-commerce sites and things like that. But primarily it's, you know, the audience that we're trying to reach, as are our business owners, that could be, you know, either service area businesses that's near and dear to my heart. Obviously, service area businesses being like contractors, for example, or even storefront businesses. Again, it's about what we learned how to developed excuse me, is search engine optimization. We started with SVO products and you know, but SVO is really kind of an all encompassing term now because there's so much that goes into it. So so pretty much any sort of business that, you know, I would consider local business, although like I said, we do have some that are, you know, more like a strictly online businesses.
[00:23:54] And what I guess what would a a business owner need to kind of decide or what would which I business owners or what do they have that would make them more or less successful using these kind of strategies and developing developing their marketing and developing leads?
[00:24:08] Well, I think, first of all, you know, I've a lot of the stuff we train on is how to get better results from Google. And so most businesses are going to have a Google my business profile. And we talk you know, we've got products on how to fully optimize those and get the best results from them as well as services also for that, but also using other Google properties to produce even better search results for their existing business, for example, something like Google Drive. I'm sure a lot of, you know, Google Drive is reasonable docs and Google Sheets and drawings in my maps and all these different types of files within Google Drive. Well, you can set those to public and those become index able documents that you can actually use for MCO purposes. And it's incredibly powerful because you can basically build out what we call Tier 1 entity assets, which are Google properties that are all pointing back to your primary Web site or your Google map listing that kind of stuff and then use those Google properties to kind of push relevancy and authority through back into your primary assets. And it helps to rank better in search results because Google loves Google.
[00:25:07] So there's like a white paper. You could create a white paper on Google Drive that points to your Web site and other references and then promote that. And that will that will help increase your. You're absolutely. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. We have this. Marketing and thought leadership and beat being authoritative content on different topics as is just fascinates a whole area that I think service businesses. You know, some of them have really figured out and I think it's really juicing, they're their results. But I think a lot of people are just missing out on this. They just don't act. And I worked.
[00:25:35] Yeah. And I mean, that's really what what I'm getting at is I think it's first really does start with getting the training to understand why to use it and how to use it properly. And then the second thing is to get it done. And again, you know, even though we originally set out just to teach people how to do stuff, invariably they always come back to the vast majority of them, come back and say, wow, that's that's great. But it it's too time consuming. Can you do it for us? And I don't blame him. I mean, like I said, I don't expect a business owner to go out and learn how to build a Google drive stack, as we call it, and then spend the next week instead of running their business, building a drive stack when they could have it outsourced to, you know, us or another provider, if that's if they don't want to do. And, you know, in a week they'll have it, but they didn't have to spend any time on it, you know.
[00:26:17] I mean, you know. So how in terms of strategy and in terms of the content and things like that, is there anything that you've seen people sort of drive success in s in terms of, you know, areas of focus or kind of owning particular areas of their market? I mean, how how do you how do you suggest people think about like, if I'm just a dentist, it's like, well, I'm a dentist just like anyone else. Are there ways that I can kind of develop a niche here or find a angle to this that will help me differentiate from from other dentists in my market, from a CEO, you know, marketing point of view?
[00:26:49] Well, content market being regular and consistent. And so the next question always comes back. People say, well, what do I market about? Like what I have? What should I be developing? Content. And, you know, you don't want it to be boring, like. And I get that. But a lot of the clients that I serve.
[00:27:03] We have, you know, bloggers that will go create posts about stuff that's useful to their audience and for a dentist. I don't really do a whole lot. Dennis work, but it might be stuff about how to keep your teeth clean, how to prevent, you know, dental issues, foods and things that you could eat that actually promote dental health and bone health. You know, things that just keep people healthy doesn't always have to be about teeth. Yeah, but creating content about stuff that would be useful to people that. And again, it's not just about the content creation, it's about stuff that people might actually read. And then multi purposing that content and getting it out across different channels. And what I mean by that is not just, you know, not just blogging and putting it on your blog, which is important because that helps to tickle the Google freshness factor of their algorithm, which is good.
[00:27:45] But now you can repurpose that blog post as a Google my business post, which are like updates to your Google, my business profile or your maps listing, which is very similar to Facebook. You can read. You can republish it to Facebook and to Twitter into a number of other different types of social media channels. If you recorded short videos with like questions and answers or that kind of stuff, which is very powerful, just like what we're doing here, you could have a video and then you can have it transcribed and that could be turned into written text content and you could have the audio ripped and that could be turned into podcasting stuff or audio files that can be played or downloaded or played wherever somebody wants.
[00:28:20] Something else is including off-line marketing methods to remember sending like direct mail and stuff that's not dead. And for the longest time I thought it was because I was in the digital marketing space. But believe it or not, sending out direct mail. I saw this funny meme on Facebook awhile back. It said, you know, in 2000 I think it was 2010, it said or something like that. It was like somebody holding a stack of physical mail and they're like, you know, and then they saw their computer with an email and they're like, oh, an email.
[00:28:47] And it says today things like, look, they're looking at their email and they're going to go and they get a physical letter and look a letter or a postcard. And so my point is, like, you know, that's kind of important, too.
[00:28:59] And if you're developing content, you can grab snippets of that content and send that out as an excuse for, you know, a sales letter or a postcard or something to remind people and what happened that you're there. And what happens is a lot of times people will get these marketing messages with your brand and they'll go to Google and search the brand name. And then that's a really powerful signal when people are going to Google and searching for a company name and then clicking through to that Web site. That's a very, very powerful WEO signal. And then also, you know, don't forget always this is something really important. And I don't know how many businesses I know from my own experience as an agency owner. How many businesses are not doing this, but remarketing, remarketing, retargeting, which is when somebody visits one of your assets, you know, primarily your main Web site or your Facebook page or something like that, where they're going to be followed around the Web with ads reminding them that you're there so that even if they didn't take action, you know, become a lead or convert into whatever your conversion goal is at the time that they visited, they may very well later, because you remind them, remember, we've all got very short attention spans. The Internet has made our attention spans even shorter. So we have to constantly remind people that we're there so that when they're ready to make that purchasing decision, they're going to think of us first. You know what I mean?
[00:30:08] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're going to hit high here. Bradley, if people want to find out more about you, about the work that you do, about semantic mastery, what's the best way to get that information?
[00:30:17] Well, I've got two resources to share with you. First one is just kind of a welcome page for your podcast listeners, it's that you can find out at SemanticMastery dot com forward slash sus for scaling up services. So again, semantic mastercard.com slash s you ask. The other one is, ah, we have a weekly webinar. It's a question and answer session that we host on YouTube that anybody can come to. It's free. It's an hour every single Wednesday. We call it Humpday Hangouts. It's if it yeah. 4:00 p.m. Eastern. We actually just did our 255th episode last week. So we've been doing this for five years strong. And again, anybody can come visit us and ask us questions about marketing, business development, anything they want. And that's it's semantic mastery, dot com slash HD questions, first for Humpday questions. So again, slash HD questions.
[00:31:04] Awesome. Brad, they will make sure that those links are in the show notes so people can click there and get those. This has been a pleasure. Great content. I love your journey. I love your history. I love the work that you've done and really figuring out a business model in the service space that works well for you. Kudos and good work. And thank you for sharing it with your audience.
[00:31:20] Thanks, Bruce. It's been an amazing talking. We thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:36:23] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.