How To Use Digital Marketing

How To Use Digital Marketing

Cody McCormack
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
3/11/2021

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.

ai generated transcription

really figure out what kpis you think makes sense to track for whatever initiative you're working on and don't let yourself get distracted or deviate from those actually iterate on improving those kpis like if you decide click through rate is what you want to improve uh actually start measuring that lay out a plan to achieve that you know if you have to change the language your plan's not good or it's not working or whatever that's one thing but don't spend three minutes or three days working on click-through rate and then get bored and then decide that you want to focus on number of impressions and then after that say actually no i want to work on ranking because that's just the recipe to get nothing done and that happens a lot in digital marketing unfortunately because these things do take so long and seo in particular uh you do just have to have a certain degree of focus and i think that's going to be valuable to a lot of small business owners and startups [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as a ceo and founder of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents trademarks and their business everything related to the business if you ever need help with anything feel free to reach out to us by going to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help now today we've got another great uh expert episode and we have uh on the on the podcast we have cody mccormick we're going to talk a little bit about um digital marketing now we've had a few other digital marketers on before and talked about various aspects but really today we're going to go a little bit behind the behind the scenes or behind the hood so or underneath the hood i don't know how you go behind the hood underneath the hood um talk a little bit more about kind of the data analytics side so if you're to get into kind of what does that look like you know everything from data analytics to key performance in key performance indicators if i say it are kpis doing a little bit of comment competitive analysis metrics that you can kind of use for success so kind of a little bit more of the some of these how you understand if it's working and what it whether it's working and make how you make those measurements so that you're not just simply throwing money into it so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast cody thanks for having me i appreciate it so i gave a bit of an introduction as to what we're going to be talking about and we'll definitely dive into that but before we get there um why don't you tell us a little bit just kind of you know your background one or two minutes so that everybody knows who you are you know why you're an expert on it and why they should listen to you sure uh well as you mentioned i have done most of my career post uh college in marketing i started out as a uh operations manager for a startup that built websites for attorneys and during that time i really got my first taste of more the analytics component which would end up becoming my specialty since then i've worked with a few smaller agencies i did uh my own business for about a year and then about three years ago i started working with a company called fine law which i've been with ever since so we do a few things but my specific team is the performance team basically what we do is enterprise seo and digital marketing for our directoryfindlaw.com which is a directory that people uh you know attorneys pay us to be on and then when you search for you know criminal attorney near me or whatever the directory pops up that's that's sort of our business model my team like i said does all the digital marketing for that and i'm sort of the team data scientist so i a lot of times come up with the data that we'll actually use to analyze things and figure out what our kpis are going to be to make sure our various initiatives are working those types of things for my company no awesome and that's definitely a helpful kind of background as to you know how or why you're an expert on the topic so now diving into the the fun part which is the expert and this is one area i you know data analytics kind of figuring out if something works is the one that i just find personally interesting as well as i'm sure the the guests or the the listeners will as well you know the the biggest gripe you know that a lot of people have generally with marketing especially when it's online and social media and you know in google adwords pay-per-click and kind of all of the digital marketing aspect is it feels like i'm putting in a ton of money and i can't really tell if it works or i don't know how well it's working and you know it's kind of you know i know i'm putting in money and i think i'm getting more clients or i think they're doing it and i don't really know if it's because of that or is this word of mouth or other things that i'm doing and so maybe walk us through you know a little bit of what is data analytics or how do you if you're taking it from a startup or a small business it doesn't have an exorbitant budget or huge budget so they can just hire someone to do it for them how do you start to even understand if you're starting to do advertising whether it's pay-per-click on social media or google or seo or how do you kind of start to measure if something is working right so i think the the bias that a lot of small business owners and startups have and reasonably so is basically just how often their phone rings which is a really good metric and that's obviously what matters at the bottom of the funnel right you want to be making money and that's you know of course the thing you're going to be focused on but from a peer marketing perspective there are just so many variables that go into that like you mentioned it could be word of mouth it could be a billboard you put them on you know the edge of town there's so many factors that could cause your phone to ring uh so from a marketing perspective we really want to look at the what you mentioned earlier the kpi so those are the the numbers we look at for specific initiatives that we can actually measure uh that thing by without being reliant on something like the phone ringing which is uh subject to so many variables so for instance you mentioned seo that's a really good one right so uh something like google search console which is a free tool that everybody who has a website has access to and if you aren't currently using google search console i highly recommend you do but you can very clearly see the number of impressions your website gets which is the number of uh searches you pop up in that somebody sees you in so they search for something in your vertical that makes sense and they're on page three and you're on page three even if they don't click on your website that would be an impression right uh if they click on you of course that's a click then you have click-through rate which is sort of impressions divided by clicks uh those are the kind of metrics you can look at that'll actually tell you what your initiatives are doing so if you're trying to optimize around a specific product you have or something and you build out a page of content for that a kpi to look at that would actually make sense would be looking at the number of search queries you get for the words that make sense for that product that you optimize your page for rather than looking at the number of times your phone rang so when you look at those those kpis then you can say okay this definitively is related to what i had done rather than just things that might be out of your control so look now let me ask you because it's a and i think that's a great explanation now let me our voice a common gripe we because we hit on seo and that's a great place to start is that you know i've talked with and i get hit up all the time most of the time i just tell them i'm not interested but i talk with a ton of seo experts and i think that that is a wide variety there's some very good people that do an excellent job and there are a lot of people that took an online course or googled it and they started that they get they don't really know what they're doing and yet the almost both the great experts and the people that don't know what they're doing you know know little of what they're doing you almost get the same answer well how long will it take or how will i know if this working like well give us about six months and we'll see if you know how this goes and it's like okay so you know i i've got to i've got to give you money for six months and basically the end of six months we'll see if it works and whether and then only after six months will even be able to tell if they are you know and they say three to six months if they're actually doing it if it's actually worthwhile investment if they're actually doing anything based on how i'm ranking so is there is that is that true is there are there key kpis or you know other performance indicators that you can look at before six months or before three months to at least see on the seo site on the data analytics side whether or not it's starting to work yeah so you have a couple things i think are interesting so one is the the three to six month timeline you mentioned for seo unfortunately that is basically true it's not like ppc like if we're doing like paid advertising on google or you know bing or something like that you'd expect to see results instantaneously same with social media advertising those types of things you can start spending money today and start getting phone calls today as well seo is much more of a long-term play that unfortunately does take a long time to see actual results uh you can see some sort of i guess leading results prior to these the sort of final results so like what would you like maybe this isn't and what would be those leading results or kind of those scenes that they could start and i'll give you an example one that i'm i'm aware but you can tell me it's terrible so we use you know as an internal tool semrush there are other ones out there there are free ones you mentioned that give you as an example your site they do a site audit or a site health right and there's at least telling you earlier on hey we have you have a whole bunch of things wrong with your site you have broken links or you have internal links that don't go anywhere or you have long too long or you know metadata or meta descriptions and different things is that a good at least early indicator or kind of what are some of those early indicators even if yes i get us three to six months you can at least say they're doing something or i can at least tell that i'm getting some bang for my buck yeah so seo brush is a great tool uh there are some other tools like that spyfu ahrefs they're all tools roughly in the same area that look at some similar things uh so you mentioned a couple things so one is like the technical seo components right um do you mean like you said i think meta descriptions being too long or title tags being too long those types of things when you change you would see that instantaneously of course but in terms of actually looking at how it's going to be viewed by google or other search engines uh some useful metrics you can look at on that would be using something like a keyword tracker like ahrefs you'd expect to start seeing uh you having more keywords that are showing up in searches and the placement for those keywords starting to move up even before that actually matter to you so if your product or service when you put it in ahrefs right now say maybe you're on page 10 on average you know eventually you move up to page 9 and page 8 you're not going to really see any more phone calls for that time because no one's going to page 8 to look at those keywords so you're not getting clicks but it is a metric you can actually track before the three to six month timelines can be very useful for you so otherwise you want to maybe summarize that you're almost looking at the trending of are you because i agree i don't think hardly any i don't know if hardly anybody ever goes beyond maybe page two or three at the very most and usually not be on page one um and so but if you're saying hey at least it's i'm not to page one or i'm not to page two or i'm not on the top ten or that but i'm trending in the right direction is that kind of a summary where you're saying is at least see if you're moving up on those moving up on those exactly yeah the trend is what about i would like it to something like fitness you know even if you your goal is to someday be at a certain weight or whatever you're not going to be there next week but next week maybe you've lost a pound or two and that's sort of the direction you're going i would say it works very similarly with seon all right so any and then before we dive in and we'll talk a little bit about the other aspects on but on seo just because i know that that one to a lot of people kind of feels like a black box or you know magic and i think you once you come up to speed and there's a lot of things that you can at least at least be knowledgeable that was maybe and i'll ask a question but i interjected myself is you know one of the other things i think is at least become a bit more knowledgeable about even if you're not an expert a little bit more knowledgeable about kind of what they're doing or what they're telling you or whether or not it makes sense because that one's one that there's you know with a little bit of research a little bit of understanding you can at least become knowledgeable to the level that you can start to understand what they're doing and whether or not they're telling you it makes sense but other is there any other kind of earlier indicators you know that one to three months kind of time frame that people could look at in addition to trending to get an idea as to whether or not what they're doing is working yeah so i think i think there's a there's kind of a two-pronged approach this one you mentioned earlier that you just mentioned now also that i wanted to touch on there's really no credentialing body for seo you can wake up tomorrow and say you're an seo expert no one can say any different it's not like being an attorney or something where you go to law school so i think the best way to actually evaluate seos if you don't have that knowledge yourself would be to just actually ask them for references if they're a good seo who has actual background experience they can bring up it should not be a problem for you for them to put you in touch with the previous client they can tell you you know yes or no they should be able to actually show you some case studies or things they've done that's the kind of evidence that would actually ask for rather than getting bogged down with trying to understand the technical jargon marketers in particular i think are very good at bsing and just saying things that that sound very impressive but really aren't so uh unfortunately in my industry there's a lot of people like that uh which you know it's not something i love about the industry but it's just the reality of it right there a lot of people are gonna say things that sound good so actually ask them for case studies actually ask them to talk to previous clients be able to back up what they say i think that's probably the easiest way for the average uh startup business owner to really be able to evaluate those types of things in terms of other things you can look at metric wise that makes sense if you're a little bit more technically savvy i think looking at things like how frequently google's crawling your website is a really good indicator as your website gets you know more content is more accessible to search engines through various things that a good seo should be doing google should be looking at your website more frequently that's an indicator that google is trying to figure out what's going on trying to figure out what sort of vertically exactly how they want to place your uh your website amongst other you know competitors or things of that nature i think those are the types of things in addition to like keyboard tracking that i mentioned earlier that are going to be the leading kpis you look at before you get to the numbers that really matter which you know obviously phone calls and things like that actually no i think that definitely makes sense so now i'm going to switch gears a little bit so we talked a little bit about seo now let's talk a little bit about ppc or you know paid per click which is generally google adwords maybe you know you could also throw in there you know social media so facebook ads or instagram ads but something where you're now paying for a click right so it's an advertising that you go on you put up an ad and people you know you're paying for either impressions that people look at it or paying for clicks one question i've always had and i get varying answers but so i'll see kind of on the analytics side is is it better to pay for impressions you know how many people view it or is it better to pay for clicks because you know but i'll give you my slightly biased answer but i don't know if i have it's really biased because i can make arguments on both sides which is you know if i pay for impressions that's just people viewing it they may not ever actually go to my website they may not actually ever convert versus at least if they do a click i can see okay they've clicked on something they've had to at least come to even if it was for half a second they came to my website or they actually did something so on the kind of on the analytics side should we you pay more attention the impressions the clicks are they both valuable they're really valuable it just depends on what you're trying to do so i would like in paying for impressions to just sort of a branding play you're like you mentioned a lot of people see it they don't click it's not going to result in immediate phone calls but it'll result in people knowing who you are you know it's very equivalent like a billboard or commercial on tv or the radio or something like that whereas pay for click is usually much more targeted traffic so prefer a law firm example if uh you just you have a high intent keyword like you know dui attorney near me that's most likely somebody who's actually looking for an attorney right then that's ready to buy so you would use a pay-per-click model for that but if you wanted to have uh a branding play that pointed out like the community service or something you're doing you could have a lot of impressions for things like attorneys doing community service and you know we live in utah so it could be something like that right uh that's gonna get your name out there it's gonna show people who you are and those are the kind of things that you know your name will be in the back of their mind you know three or six months from now when somebody says hey do you know any lawyers and then they say oh actually i did see this one so it's valuable but it's not valuable in the same way and it should definitely be approached differently right you shouldn't look at uh pay-per-click models in my opinion through anything other than a pure roi lens so if you know you're spending ten dollars per click and you know you you know that it takes you know maybe 10 people go to your landing page before one person signs up and that one person who signs up pays 105 dollars then you know you're basically going to be making five dollars profit right in that that sort of mathematical equation if it doesn't work out that you're actually making money then you need to figure out how to optimize that campaign so it is making money or abandon that campaign uh impressions are a little bit different right you just want to think okay i have 500 that i just want to spend to get my name out there and i'm not going to necessarily be concerned about how much money that makes me right now i just i just think it's valuable to get my name out there so it's a very different approach and mindset but they're both valid so now i'll follow up on that because my question so let's say you know you're trying to get your name out there because at the end of the day every company is going to want to make money right you don't make money you don't have return on investment you're not going to be in you're not going to be in business for very long you know there are exceptions uber is better out they don't make money amazon didn't make money but for most companies you know it's going to really be hey if i don't make if i don't make money eventually i'm going to go out of business so kind of with that you know so you do a whole bunch of impressions let's say everybody sees it but it takes a while to build that how do you measure you know clicking is easy if it's a click-through rate you can say okay this is how many people they have clicked through and i can see okay i can measure how many people actually convert and therefore i can say okay for every click so many clicks i pay i get these many amount of conversions and then you can either work to optimize it or at least you know what your return on investment is how do you measure with impressions that you actually you know if it's a longer build is there a way to measure you know what is working or whether or not it makes sense if you if you have the capability to do more advanced tracking where you actually have attribution models and you can see exactly how somebody got to you so an attribution model would be something like um we know they first came across our company and uh uh you know we were doing an impression-based ad six months ago and then three months later they maybe came across us on an ad on facebook if you're doing sort of like retargeting system or something like that uh after they saw that on facebook then they went to our website and they call our number and you can sort of trace through um the the pipeline they went through to actually contact you then you can actually assign value to each thing and it's maybe a little bit arbitrarily mathematically but you can say okay we'll just say that the impression ad counts as ten percent of this conversion we'll say the facebook ad counts as thirty percent and however you wanna assign things down the line like that that's one way to do it that makes a lot of sense it's a little bit more complex to set up and it probably takes a little bit more um time than the average entrepreneur might want to give to it but i think that's a really good way to track it if you're not just looking at it as i have 500 extra dollars my marketing budget i want to get my name out there if you actually want to track it i would recommend doing some sort of a more complex attribution model like that okay no definitely makes sense so um so now we do that so that's one way to track it and i i think it's an interesting kind of an ongoing and i like you know it's kind of almost the attorney answer it depends on what you're trying to do what the impressions versus pay-per-click if you were looking and we'll dive into the next top in just a minute but you're looking at a startup or a small business should i start out with uh if i could only understand or come up or look at one metric pay-per-click versus impressions which one or how would you make that determination i would say pay-per-click would be more appropriate for the vast majority of businesses usually the the branding place i think something further down the line when you uh have a little bit like i said money to just maybe throw away or at least look at it in that sense that you're not necessarily looking for a definite roi pay-per-click much more useful you can actually see what you're getting you can scale it as appropriate up until you know obviously there's sort of a market cap where you can't scale beyond that but if you get an actual optimized ppc campaign where you know you're making money you can just keep adding more to that as long as the market allows so i think for the average entrepreneur that's a much more uh safe bet no i think that it definitely makes sense so now we're going to switch gears one more at least one more time and i always say one more time and then i always say well it might be more than one more type but competitive analysis which is another kind of you know goes along with this and you know competitive analysis means to me and then you know you certainly flavor that or add on to it which is you know you're looking at what your competitors are doing online and when they're talking about digital marketing what are they doing for their pay-per-clicks or you know their ad campaigns and what are they doing to optimize their seo what are they doing kind of how do you start to as a startup or small business dive in and should you be looking at what your competitors are doing and if so how do you kind of dive in and start to understand what they're doing and how to best compete against them yeah so you should definitely be looking at what your competitors doing competitive analyses are just a fundamental part of digital marketing i think there's kind of two tracks you could take one is just to do the sort of basic things like looking at their website seeing what types of content they have what types of keywords they're optimized for a lot of that you can just do with your eyes you don't actually need a tool if you have the budget to get some more advanced tools things like scm rush and spyfu are really good ways to actually see how they're targeting uh things and both organic and paid i think that makes a lot of sense one thing that i always cautious people to be uh weary of though is don't assume just because your competitors are doing it's a good idea it makes sense you still need to actually evaluate yourself and see if it's actually gonna result in more business for you so i would say look at uh just look at their website at the kind of a base first pass see what they are actually doing that you're not in terms of just the way they've written things the types of the way they're positioning themselves in the market and then like i said if you have if you have the buddy for things like scm rush or spyfu look at their paid campaigns those tools aren't great they're uh they're they're best we have though i guess is how i would describe it so there's a lot of inaccuracies in something like seo rush or spyfu we've we've run those tools on our own website just to see what it thinks we're doing compared to what we're actually doing it's oftentimes way off but it's it's you know it's what we have available to us so i would look at things like that is there any better tool to look at or kind of those the best tools if you wanting to start to get into kind of unfortunate analysis i would say those are the best uh sem rush spyfu and ahrefs are the three big tools that i always recommend uh using some combination there's a lot of overlapping their features and capabilities but yeah those are those are pretty much the best we have unfortunately so now oh go ahead oh no need go for it so now so if i want to understand so when i say competitor analysis one of the things that kind of comes to mind is you know seeing how they rank on the you know google search right is our is that for that feature whether it's you know hrefs or sm russia whichever platform you choose do they give you a fairly good idea of how they rank or what are the things what are the strains that you can find out about your competitors are reasonably accurate and what are the things that maybe you shouldn't worry about as much because they're less accurate the things that are very accurate or at least the most accurate the tools offer i would say is the ranking data so if you look at ahrefs and see what keywords are ranking and that's usually pretty good uh because it's actually an objective standard that you can just see you can just but what the other tool does is it just goes onto google basically and it searches keywords and it sees where everyone's ranked and then it puts that in the database so there's there's not much guesswork there uh the things that are less accurate are like tools like semrush where it's guessing how much they're spending on ppc it's just looking at the number of ads it sees and it's trying to predict how much they're paying for ads and a lot of variables go into how much they're paying for ads that you don't have access to from the outside and it's just trying to do some math to figure out those types of things and that's where the tools are the least accurate uh in my view but like i said they are the best we have and if that's all you have which usually will because you're not going to typically have any access to how much they're actually spending on ppc or something it's it's a good place to look at but yeah i would say the ranking data is the most accurate uh but on the flip side of that i don't think most people should worry so much about rank i know it's easy to focus on that because people want to worry about where they're ranked but really you should worry about um like i said the the bottom of the line at the bottom of the funnel i should say uh numbers like how many actual conversions you're getting if you're not ranking super well but you're getting more conversions than you can handle then that's better than ranking super well for terms that maybe no one cares about or not likely to convert all right no i definitely think it makes sense so now you kind of alluded to it and we'll kind of transition as we start to wrap up the podcast which is you know and before i ask my one last question but you know you say you know it is easy to start to focus on the rankings right no i got to get ring tired and definitely makes sense if you're seo and that's how you get found and that's how you're going to do it it has a big impact if you get into the you know the top three and or top number one but the top three you're going to have a much higher amount of eyeballs on it for the right words and the right keywords but you know the other question is is you know when you're looking at rankings it's also looking at the right rankings in the sense that if you're looking at words that really don't matter they have a low amount of people that are searching from them you can rate number one and if nobody looks at those words it really doesn't matter so last before my last question what would be kind of if you're looking at whether it's competitive analysis your own analysis how do you start to figure out which words you should be trying to incorporate into your website seo or pay-per-click or whatever how do you start to determine which words to go after i would recommend using a free tool something like uh there's a there's a keyword tool in uh google ads which is very useful so you can just kind of do the the geo you're looking at the types of keywords you're looking at it'll recommend various other keywords it'll tell you how much it thinks those keywords will cost and how much search traffic it thinks they'll get so that's a really good place to start looking at figuring out how people are searching google trends is another really useful uh tool to use so you can just go and put whatever you want google trends will show you the sort of relative search volume over time another way to look at without using tools that i think is more accessible to a lot of business owners is just to search things that you think make sense and then scroll down to the bottom it usually has the people also search area and it'll have you know the actual queries people are making and if you scroll to the very bottom there's the related searches area those are really good just sort of free ways to get a lot of ideas about what exactly people are looking for and you can sort of do that in an editorial process right you can do your initial search then you can see what people are all searching and you can search for those words and scroll down again and keep looking and you can build up a pretty large uh database on your own just what exactly is important to consumers in that space think about questions people are asking you might not necessarily have thought of and kind of go from there i think that's that's probably the best way people can actually find specific keywords but just to circle back briefly to what you said about um the ranking thing i think this is largely sort of my industry's fault a lot of seo people sell rank uh which makes business owners just think in those terms but i really think it is it's worth repeating that it's not the most important thing first of all websites don't rank pages rank so you could have a page that's doing very well and your website's not doing very well in general for that keyword but if that page is a page that's likely to lead to conversions that's still very important and very valuable to you and it probably makes more sense to think of that in those terms and like you mentioned as well um you really want to make sure that what you're ranking for is something that's likely to convert you know if you're ranking for something in the number one spot but it's not something that anybody it's not a keyword that you know necessarily implies some sort of intent on the behalf of the consumer that's going to lead to conversion it's not doing any good so don't let some seo kind of talk you into being excited because you're ranking number one for a word that doesn't matter yeah and i think that that's that's the one always kind of thing that it seems to be a bit of a red flag is everybody say oh i can you know the the companies that generally make the the the claim oh i can get you ranked number one for 20 keywords in the first month it's like well yeah if you go for words that nobody's ever searching or it's such a long sentence and nobody's ever going to type it in you can probably get there within a month but it's not going to do any good at conversions so i think that's definitely something to keep in mind and watch out for when people are trying to get you to use their service if they're trying to say hey we can do this if the industry is saying we can it takes three to six months and that's the where the reality is and somebody comes along says i can do this in 30 days or 15 days or whatever you know it's a definite red flag because they're trying to sell you on something that isn't a reality or isn't valuable at least as we wrap up if um you know i always have my normal episodes i always have my top top last two questions with the expert episodes i only have one so we'll jump to that now which is now if you're talking to you know startup or small businesses just trying to get into data analytics for the you know for seo for pay-per-click or digital marketing what would be the and i know it's hard but what would be the number one tip you'd give them is to get started out in this so i have two uh one that i think comes up a lot in the technical space uh is people getting excited about sort of the new shiny things so for instance i do a lot of machine learning and a lot of small business owners when i talk to say oh you know can i use machine learning for this or that and usually the answer is just no it's just generally not that appropriate for for somebody's business unless you have a specific problem that you think machine learning can solve and you have data or something it's just in that one you know the machine learning example that's probably not helpful for you and i know that you it's easy to see a lot of news articles to talk about how awesome machine learning is when you think oh i can just do something like that so i think just getting away from the blockchain is another good example of something that people just see in the news a lot and they want to integrate in their business i think avoiding things like that and focusing more on fundamentals is generally going to be appropriate from an analytics digital marketing standpoint more more purely i would say really figure out what kpis you think makes sense to track for whatever initiative you're working on and don't let yourself get distracted or deviate from those actually iterate on improving those kpis like if you decide click through rate is what you want to improve uh actually start measuring that lay out a plan to achieve that you know if you have to change the language your plan's not good or it's not working or whatever that's one thing but don't spend three minutes or three days working on click-through rate and then get bored and then decide that you want to focus on number of impressions and then after that say actually no i want to work on ranking because that's just the recipe to get nothing done and that happens a lot in digital marketing unfortunately because these things do take so long and seo in particular you do just have to have a certain degree of focus i think that's gonna be valuable to a lot of uh small business owners and startups i know i think that's you know a little bit what you said is interesting because it kind of reflects a lot of what we do with um even on intellectual property one is that you hit on is you know have a strategy what you want to accomplish because just saying oh i hear seo i hear search engine optimization or i need i need to do pay-per-click or i need to do google ads and not knowing why you're doing it is going to just leave you first of all you're going to waste a lot of money and two you're not going to have the results you want because there's not a strategy behind it so you know that's the same thing with patterns and trademarks they can be very valuable to your business but if you don't know how they're gonna do it all you're doing is somebody told me i need i should get a patent on this one you know go and do a little bit of your research talk or find a good attorney or someone that can talk through it and same thing on seo and digital marketing because you need to understand why this will benefit your company how it fits into your strategy and where it's a place to start because there's it's a big field that you can go everything as we already talked through and we just kind of tip the thing of do you do content marketing do you do organic content do you do you know social media do you do google adwords do you do seo do you do all of them do you one of them and there's a lot of things that you can tackle you can't tack them all the same time and they all a lot of them take time to build even just getting a social media presence even you know while we always see the people that go viral and the people that have most people on social media it still takes a while to build that audience to get a following and to grow that you know get them engaged and so i think i like that to your point is really having that kind of strategic overlay and that understanding what you're doing why you're doing it and what not just going by the buzzwords or what people doing it and then be in for the long haul because it's going to take you can't just do it for a few days and say oh it's not working or oh i don't know how to do this give up on it because all you're going to do is bounce around between a lot of them so i think those are both great pieces of advice well people want to you know reach out to they want to find out more they want to you know they want to be a customer or a client of fine law they want to reach out to you personally they want to pick your brain they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to connect up there and find out more i would say on linkedin uh is the most uh easy way to contact me so it's just the linkedin cody mccormack my full name my last name is spelled m-c-c-o-r-m-a-c-k it's a little bit different than the typical spelling but that's the the easiest way to contact me uh and i will definitely respond to you quickly if you want to be my best friend or uh talk about anything else all right well maybe you'll make a whole lot of new best friends so hopefully i appreciate you coming on sharing a bit of your expertise been certainly very valuable now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell for our normal episodes or you're an expert you want to come on and share feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the podcast we'd love to have you two also if you're a listener couple additional things one is uh make sure to click subscribe to your podcast player so you know when all of our awesome episodes come out and leave us a review so new people can find us last but not least if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else with your business reach out to us at miller ip law just go to strategymeeting.com thanks again cody it's been fun it's been a pleasure to have you on and uh wish you the next leg of your journey even better than the last some thanks for having me i appreciate it good luck to you thank