Beyond The Messaging Connection, Episode 1: Maps vs Reality

Episode Transcription

Ryan Chapman: [00:00:00] Hey, this is Ryan Chapman. I'm with my brother Trent Chapman. Say hi, Trent.

Trent Chapman: Hello, everybody.

Ryan Chapman: We're going to be covering a series here that we call Beyond the Messaging Connection, which is a discussion that goes beyond what we have in the book, The Messaging Connection. If you haven't already read The Messaging Connection or listened to it, you can do so by texting LEARN to (949) 835-5300. That will be in the notes so you can look at that there. But that would give you an audio and a pdf version. If you want to buy the book of course you can go to Amazon and get it.

What we want to start with is actually the very beginning and these are going to be long format as you can probably tell if you already started listening to this episode. We're going to spend some time really getting into it because we want you to be able to understand all of the thinking that goes behind The Messaging Connection, specifically so you can be even better at building your business and growing your business.

[00:01:00] Because The Messaging Connection- the subtitle to it is How to Increase Profits by Connecting with People the Way They Want. Trent and I for a long time we've had, you know, our focus on how do you make a profit or a business profitable? Because sometimes people get confused about why they're in business and they start doing funny stuff and we feel like it's important to always remember the purpose of the business, ultimately, in terms of what it's supposed to produce for you as a business owner's profit. That profit can be translated into time and freedom and things like that, but we use the profit as a measure of the effectiveness or efficiency of the business. So that's why that's always going to be a primary part of whatever we're talking about.

Obviously it's not the most important thing in the world. People and relationships are, which is interesting because The Messaging Connection really focuses in on how do you create real, solid relationships? And so that's just kind of a brief [00:02:00] overview, but I want to start at the beginning of the book.

At the beginning of the book I tell a story about our 2009 Honda Pilot and it's got a navigation system in it. But the navigation system has, if you're familiar with how your old navigation systems would work, there was a DVD, Trent?

Trent Chapman: A DVD, yeah. You'd have to get updated every year.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, it was quite the economic model they came up with. But I just never bothered to do it because it wasn't that big of a deal.

So I've got a 2009 map in that car. Now, that car is kind of older. Our kids that are in high school, they drive it. It's kind of beat up. They've all had a fender bender or two in it. So it's not like something I want to throw a bunch of money into. But the maps of that car don't match reality anymore. In fact, the neighborhood that I live in wasn't even around. It was just a bunch of cactus and sand in 2009. [00:03:00] So, the roads where we live aren't even in the navigation system for that car.

The reason I bring up that story though is to highlight this concept of maps versus reality. We have maps of our world and those maps usually are formed unconsciously for the most part. It's just our observations and perceptions about the way things are and usually it's centered around our own personal experience and observation, which makes total sense.

But, our maps are not reality. They are our best representation of reality. And so it's really important to be able to understand that distinction because if you understand that distinction now you have a chance of actually intentionally [00:04:00] upgrading your map so it more closely matches reality. And the closer that your perception of reality is to reality then the better you are able to navigate the world.

Trent Chapman: I think something to point out here, Ryan, and this so goes along with the concept of your map or your plans, usually you use a map to figure out how to get to a destination, right? And so just like in business, we set a goal and we set a path to get to that goal. We often don't realize that our plan is always going to be different than what we actually do. And that's the same thing with figuring out your strategy for success in marketing and business is you may come up with an awesome killer concept or theory, but the actual path is going to be different. Reality will always set you straight and you might have to adjust to whatever reality is. So the things that we'll cover in today's episode is gonna help you recognize reality from what you might think is a good theory or good thought or good plan so that you can actually make a more [00:05:00] correct plan from the get-go.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah

Trent Chapman: It makes it so you're less likely to have to deviate as much from your original plan.

Ryan Chapman: But, you know when you were saying that made me think of virtual reality headsets. You know, they have these headsets you can put on and you don't actually see what's in front of you. You see what the little screen inside of the headset is showing you. And so if the screen in the headset showed you a wide open field and you started running and you're inside your house you're going to hit a wall, you know? And you're gonna go 'Wait a second. This is wide open.' And your virtual reality headset saying 'No, it's wide open.' That's kinda the same thing that you were getting at- is we might have this plan and it looks perfect. It's like oh, hey, we got plenty of runway here. We can get off the ground and it's going to be great.

Trent Chapman: Let's get all our campaigns. Let's just do it and set it to go and we'll make tons of money.

Ryan Chapman: And then once you let it go all of a sudden you realize there was a wall three feet away from your face that you weren't even aware of, right? Your map hadn't been updated to recognize that wall that's in reality in front of you. And so [00:06:00] this idea and concept is really important understanding business because the better your map matches reality the better your plans are going to actually go. And you'll still run into some things. Like I'm-

Trent Chapman: That's just life in business. You're going to always run into something and that's a concept that a lot of business owners that are new fail to recognize. I'm not a good business owner because I make a good plan and it works. I'm a good business owner because I recognize my plans will always change.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, we've gotta adapt.

Trent Chapman: Adapt to say that's not a failure. I learned what didn't work. Let's try something different.

Ryan Chapman: That being said, there are some things you can do to just update your maps in general so that you can avoid some of those mistakes. And the basis or the reason, like the whole reason, that we bring this up at the beginning of the book is because there has been a shift, a huge, I mean, I don't even know that people comprehend it to understand the numbers, right? Because we throw around numbers like billion and we're like, okay, yeah, that's four billion, five billion and people go, okay, yeah, billion. [00:13:21] But if you think about that the entire planet's population, right, is something in between 7 and 8 billion right now and the latest numbers are that five billion people on the planet are mobile connected to the internet. So, that's like insane.

Trent Chapman: And most of those probably don't use the computer. Half of them probably at most.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Well, four billion people are on smartphones. Four billion. I mean that's really got to set in. If it's not over half it's, you know, half of the population. And you have to remember too that when we talk about four and five billion people being on the internet that doesn't count all the children, right? So, there's people from newborns all the way up to like 10 years old that may not have a smart device of any sort. In third world countries, you know, of [00:14:21] course, it's going to be an older age before they even have the possibility of getting connected to the internet just because of finances. But still, even with all those limitations, 5 billion people on mobile. So that's really important to know.

And, to your other point, that half of those five billion people don't even touch a desktop or a laptop computer, right? It's probably close to 3 billion of those people only have either a smartphone or maybe a tablet. Interesting- I saw today Google has discontinued producing any tablets. They're like 'now we're done with tablets, we're just going to do smartphones.' That's not to say there won't be Android tablets, but Google's out of that business. So when Google gets out of something it's kind of a sign that maybe it's not going as far. So really it's coming down to there's a couple tablet makers but most of it's just smart phones. And that concept is really, really critical to understand because your map of reality may be based on your experience. Which [00:15:21] for most business owners, we-

Trent Chapman: They're at the computer.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, they're at the computer. Because we offer software that facilitates mobile marketing through text messaging, calling. And I look at our Google Analytics and it skews towards the computer which is not normal for everything else. Everything else skews towards the smartphone. But it's because most of our users are in that environment. That's why we kind of start this whole book and this series with this conversation because we really want to make sure that you're clear on the fact that most everybody is consuming most of what they consume on the smartphone.

Trent Chapman: Yeah. We have a different demographic. If you're doing business-to-business, you will have a higher percentage of people than normal on computers viewing your content. But even still, business-to-business, a lot of our traffic comes in on mobile. If our website was not mobile optimized in 2019 we would [00:16:21] lose a lot of our traffic. I don't know if you've had this experience- there are still websites that are not mobile optimized. You go to it and it's just a bad experience that you're just like, I don't want to try and zoom in, zoom out, scroll and try to find the right stuff. I'd rather bounce and find another company that has their site easy for me to view and scroll through on a mobile device.

It's amazing, though, that it still to this day businesses put mobile as a secondary viewing option and focus on desktop experience.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, there's very few Industries where that's a good idea anymore and, for most, you should have everything mobile-optimized anyways. But that's I think the big thing we want you to understand is because there are billions and billions of people on smartphone devices, right? So it's about 3 billion are on Android and 1 billion are on smartphones. So that's kind of the way it breaks out.

Trent Chapman: iPhone.

Ryan Chapman: iPhone. What did I say?

Trent Chapman: You said smartphone, which, it kind of makes sense?

Ryan Chapman: It's not a miss for some of us! But in the United [00:17:21] States, Canada, kind of your developed countries, it skews towards a 50-50 split- iPhone and Android. So the reason that there is a three quarter to quarter split worldwide is because Android tends to skew towards the third world countries. So, depending on where your market is, that's important for you to understand as well because it tells you quite a bit about the market as well.

So that's important information to have because now as you're thinking about marketing- and I like to define marketing is so we have advertising, which is to get someone to raise their hands and say hey, I'm actually interested in what you're doing, right? It looks like you're solving a problem that I have. That's what advertising does. Marketing is once we've identified that person and we have some sort of contact information.

Well, marketing's job is to relay information to the consumer, the perspective consumer, so that they can make a buying decision. And once they get into a position where they can start making a buying decision now, we're entering into sales territory.

Then once they, [00:18:21] of course, make the buying decision if they become a customer, now they're a customer. So those are the kind of definitions we're going to be using as we go through. That's how we think about these different phases a person goes through as they engage with your company. And so in marketing, it's all about relaying information and trying to start a conversation that enters into the sales portion of the process. And what a lot of people don't think about is- sent or delivered doesn't mean consumed and in marketing that's a really important concept. Is there something you would like to see on that, Trent?

Trent Chapman: No, I just think that we all in marketing, if you've been in for a while, you understand that concept. But still I think it gets lost in the back of your mind because you're focused on 'okay, how many people do I have on my list? How many emails can I broadcast out?' And that's a very common thing that people get fixated on is 'well, I've got 20,000 people my email list.' But the more savvy you get in business the more you recognize well, it doesn't matter how many people are on my list if they're not the right people and they're not opening and consuming the content. And that's [00:19:21] where we kind of introduced to a lot of people- what if you had a tenth the size of the list but they were consuming most of your content, interacting with your content? Wouldn't you do better than what you're doing right now? Instead of building a huge email list that you can't call, can't text, can't communicate with except for a very controlled medium that has a very high spam and block rate.

Ryan Chapman: So we'll go into more depth in future episodes on some of these concepts where the rubber hits the road but at this stage, we really want you to think about the concept that with so many people consuming on mobile that's where you have to be considering consumption. And whatever the consumption is- like if I'm sending direct mail, I've got to think about what environment are they going to be in when they receive the direct mail and then consume it, right?

And so that's an important consideration as much as, almost as important as, the content of the direct mail piece. In the same concept- any other marketing we do. Because just about every other media is going to go to their smartphone. We got to be thinking about what is that experience like on the [00:20:21] smartphone? Since that's where most content is consumed.

And you know, we won't talk about the societal impacts of people being in their phones all the time, but that's the reality that we have to deal with. And so as businesses, they're trying to get our message out there and get people to recognize. Because what we're doing just like we talked about- maps and reality. We need to update the map so that we have a better picture of reality so we can make a better plan.

When it comes to marketing what we're trying to do is we're trying to update their map. Because their map right now tells them to make the buying decisions that they currently make. They need to change that map in order to more clearly see why they would want to start doing business with you and that all depends on consumption and interaction with your content. And so you've got to understand where they're consuming it. So where might they be receiving it? What else is going on around them in their lives? And how do we keep them in a place where they can consume what we're sending them so that they can change their map, update it and then make better [00:21:21] decisions?

So really, you want to think about that. One of the things ,Trent, that I think is really an important place to start for people, just so they can know 'well, what's the situation with my market?' is if you have any traffic going to your website, hopefully you've got Google Analytics or something like that installed, go look at which devices are visiting your website and how long they're staying on your website with each device.

Trent Chapman: And also look at the countries or areas. If you're an international business you want to see the volume of business you're getting from different countries. If you're focused to a local business and getting a lot of traffic outside of that area you might want to take that into consideration when you're looking at your conversion. Because if it's a local business you're marketing and you're get a lot of traffic out of area that's going to affect your conversion numbers, but it may not tell the true story of how well your message is converting.

So keep that in mind as well, but that's yeah, that's definitely something that you want to look at is what device are they on? What area are they on and am I connecting with the right audience with my message? And we'll get into the messaging. This is the obviously The Messaging Connection. [00:22:21] The real key here is the right message, to the right audience, to the right medium and we'll get into about those details in future episodes and go deep on those three.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, so for right now just think about that. I would say if there's anything that you can act on out of this episode- and this episode is probably going to be our shortest one because we're just really kind of scratching the surface and setting a foundation- but if you want to act on what you're learning here, the first thing to do is go look at your Google Analytics. If you don't have Google Analytics installed on whatever website you have, get it installed.

The next thing is you may have properties on social media- so you might have like a Facebook page or Instagram page- go look at whatever statistics you can find on those pages to see, you know, well we can just tell you. If they're on Instagram, they're on mobile. If they're on Facebook, they're on mobile. It's about 99% of traffic on Facebook is mobile. If you want to see that you just go look at your Facebook ads. If you're running any Facebook ads you can look at the statistics and it'll [00:23:21] show you. It's almost all on mobile.

Trent Chapman: And it's been that way since, I think 2012, 2011.

Ryan Chapman: There's a graph in the book you can look at that and see.

But when you consider the volume of numbers and the fact that everybody's on it, in the United States people are getting smartphones as early as age 10. So any developed country they're actually saying people are starting to get a mobile smartphone, a smart mobile connection to the internet, at age 10. That's just crazy to me. But you need to also understand that people prefer all their communication be through their smartphone. And there's no age now- there probably was 20 years ago-

Trent Chapman: What about your 70 year old Grandpa?

Ryan Chapman: 70 year old Grandpa is on his smartphone. Grandma is texting. So there aren't these limits that people see. Now, there are different demographics skewing that.

Trent Chapman: You're not going to find Grandpa [00:24:21] on Snapchat as much but he will text back his grandkids.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, so the older the older generation will tend towards texting and calling. Although they are using some other messaging apps. Your kind of the middle of the road. These are probably people from 60 to 30. They're mostly going to be doing texting and messaging through certain apps. It would be the social media and stuff like that, would be how they communicate. They will do phone calls, but they've all gotta- and this is true for everybody- they've got to know the number, right? If you're calling and they don't recognize the number, fat chance you're getting through. That's just the way it is now.

So that, you know, you get to know these different rules and the different uses of people that are on the smart devices, and you can take some anecdotal evidence from your own experience and from the experience of those around you, but then you want to make sure that you don't rely too heavily on that because that's normally skewed to [00:25:21] whatever your demographic is and if that's not the demographic of your customer then you don't want to be relying on that. But overall you want to look at it.

If you're still not sure, go ask customers and prospects. Or observe them, better yet. Because observation is a more accurate indicator of what people are doing than asking them because we tend to skew towards what we think is good instead of what we're actually doing.

And so if you ask somebody how often are you on your phone? They're going to probably say well, I probably look at it 10 times a day and then if we look at their stats they're probably picking up their phone two to three hundred times a day. That's fairly average. And you can learn some of that if you're using an iPhone device. If you want to see how often you're picking up your device there is Screen Time. Is that what it's called?

Trent Chapman: Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: And you can look at the statistics on that. I think it's useful for you to do. Go look at the statistics. Look at your screen time and see how often are you picking up your phone? How often are you checking messages? You know?

Trent Chapman: Top used [00:26:21] apps. Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: Phone. Texting. Go check those out and just take a look for your own experience to see well, what's my own experience actually, not just what I think or perceive it to be? What is it actually? And then go look at your inboxes, look at your phone. So how many calls did you miss? How many voice mails do you have that are unread? How many emails do you have that are unread? How many text messages do you have that are unread? How many Facebook direct messages or Twitter or SnapChat or whatever other messaging apps you use, how many unreads do you have? Just kind of take a look at that and it kind of starts to give you a clue.

And then you go to think about how easy is it to be discovered on those? How likely is it that I could communicate with somebody through those mediums? And that's a good place to start for the discussion that we're going to be having through this series. And just kind of get a good feel for where is it in my life? How do I communicate with people? How do I interact with people both on a personal level, on a business level?

And then start questioning some things. Start thinking about well, [00:27:21] why do I skew towards predominantly email in my own marketing? Why do I try and call people? If you're doing texting why do I try and text them, you know? Go through all the different mediums that you've identified on your own phone, through your own experience, and say, okay what do I skew towards on my personal side? What do I skew towards on my business side? And why is that? You don't have to come up with answers, you know, there's not a right answer I'm trying to get you to come to. I want you just to see what your experience is and then start just being a little observant of people around you. Maybe ask some of your friends what are their numbers for these different things, you know? How often do they pick up their phone? What medias do they look at? Where do they have unread messages? Where are they not consuming content that's being sent to them?

And that'll give you some indications of where to start thinking and how you can start adjusting your business. Just doing that, the conscious observation, is going to update your map.

Alright, so here's your homework- and [00:28:21] nobody likes homework so you can call it whatever you want- your homework is just to go back, look at your Google Analytics. If you don't have Google Analytics set up, get it set up so you can start seeing what devices people are using as they are going to your website because that'll help you to make sure that you use the right approach as you start marketing and adjusting your marketing.

Number two is: if you don't have Facebook Pixel installed, get a Facebook Pixel installed on your website. I know it's 2019 and everybody should have that done but a lot of people still don't know about it and they don't do that. So if you don't have Google Analytics, get Google Analytics. If you don't have a Facebook Pixel, get a Facebook Pixel installed. Then go look at your stats from your Pixel, as well as your Analytics. If you already do have them installed then that will start to give you something to think about.

Now, in our next episode we're gonna be talking about the email dilemma. Email has been kind of a standard for marketing for the last 20 years, but email has an interesting history and it's very different from some of the other media. So we're going to talk about that and how [00:29:21] do we start making adjustments so we can be more effective in a mobile-first world.

So this is Ryan Chapman and Trent Chapman, and we look forward to talking to you on the next episode.