Is Your PC Paradigm Hiding Opportunity Right In Front of You?

Transcription of Episode

Hey, it's Ryan Chapman from FixYourFunnel and in today's podcast episode, I wanted to review some topics from my new book, The Messaging Connection. Of course, I think it would be great if you got the book because there's a lot you can learn from just looking at physical pages or, if you're into digital books, that's good, too.

There's a couple concepts that I thought would be really valuable for people that want to listen in on the podcast and I'll go into them a little differently than maybe I do in the book, but still approaching the same topic.

The first topic I really wanted to cover was getting this mobile paradigm. It's really tough in the podcast environment really show you this and to really get the impression that you need to get from it.

You have to understand, if you got onto the internet when the internet first kind of started getting really popular, which I think was in the early 90s as America Online was sending out discs to everybody to get them online, [00:01:00] what you had was people getting online with a computer. In fact, for many people, their very first computer that they bought was so that they could get online. It wasn't a matter of they had a computer just sitting around and then they got online, they bought the computer to go online.

The early phenomenon of people making billions of dollars off of internet-based companies came because there were these people congregating on the internet, going and looking for information and getting stuff. But as you compare PC units sold to this new trend, which is mobile phones (smartphones in particular) and tablets, as that trend has evolved, it dwarfs PC sales.

My brother and I started a company back in 2007 and, in that time, if you remember what was going on in 2007, basically the mortgage industry was melting down. The values of homes were [00:02:00] plummeting, all these people are in a bad spot, and my brother and I had a training company that helped real estate agents know how to negotiate with the bank to help banks accept offers on properties that were less than what the property was actually worth. This was called a short sale.

So we were helping real estate agents to do this, but our entire business was built on the back of people being able to get online, look at what our event was about, register for that event online, and then come attend in the physical world. We were really relying heavily upon people having a computer with internet access in order for us to be able to get to them.

It was in that same year that the smartphone kind of was born, but it wasn't like everybody had a smartphone at that point. Now if you fast forward to today, this year over two billion smartphones and tablets were sold. This year. And it's not just this year, it's been that way for several years now. This rocketing of getting people on the [00:03:00] internet through the phone, which was largely financed by the carriers, we had this sudden explosion of people being able to get online.

There's a lot more people online today than there ever was before. That means there's these huge new opportunities, but that rapid shift in the topography of what's going on also comes with some consequences.

There's a saying I introduced in the beginning of my book, I didn't introduce the saying, I just used it in the beginning of my book, but the saying is, "Your map is not the territory."

I have a 2009 Honda Pilot, my kids drive it to school, and it has a navigation system. When it first came out, it was awesome. But that navigation system, the map is on a little drive, a little, I think it's a DVD underneath the seat, and that map hasn't been updated since 2009. I just haven't found it worth it because of smartphones. But the point being, it's got this [00:04:00] map in it, which is really cool except for the map is from 2009.

A lot of the places where my kids might want to go with that navigation system aren't even available to them on that map. It's an important understanding to see that what you perceive to be the way things are may not actually be the way things are.

In other words, your map is not the territory.

When you understand that concept, it's really important because it helps you to recognize the need for trying to update your map.

The map I'm talking about in this circumstance or this scenario is this map of the internet. Your experience if you were born, let's say mid 80s or earlier, your experience with the internet was largely founded on the PC. In fact, for many small business owners that are maybe doing marketing automation with Infusionsoft, you're spending a lot of your time developing your marketing program, thinking about yourselves processes, sitting in front of a [00:05:00] desktop computer or a laptop.

Your paradigm is largely shaped by that experience. So as you look at your marketing, as you look at your sales processes, there's a good chance that, without even realizing it, you're coming at it from a totally different paradigm from most people who are consuming your content.

If you do any Facebook marketing whatsoever, then you will know if you go look at your statistics that most of your ads are being shown on mobile devices. In fact, I like to ask this question when I'm talking to people to get a feel for what their market does and, of course, each market is a little bit different. But even my market, where most of the people are actually on a PC all day long that I want to talk to, they're consuming their ads on their mobile device.

They kind of do a little bit of isolation for the most part. When they're on their PC, they're working, but when they're open and exploring, they're on their mobile device.

95% is the number I hear [00:06:00] frequently, give or take a couple percentage points, of their ad traffic is on mobile. What that tells you is that most of the time, people are consuming your marketing or your sales, it's happening on their phone. It's not happening at their desktop computer.

So if you don't go through your experience that you're asking people to go through with your marketing and your sales on your mobile phone, you don't really know what your prospect or customer is going through. You can't really adjust to make sure that you're giving them the best possible experience.

That's something that's really important and I hope that from this episode, you'll be able to walk away maybe with a slightly updated map. A map that sees the world a little bit differently, that you recognize that even though you spend a lot of time on a PC or a personal computer developing your marketing flow, developing how people are going to interact with your business, most people are actually consuming it on their mobile phone.

In fact, today I was part of a little [00:07:00] Mastermind and we were talking about somebody's sales process and they said, "You know, I know from looking at the numbers that most of the people who buy, buy on PC, but almost all of our marketing is happening on mobile. Why do you think that is?"

My answer is the same answer I would give you which is, it's probably because the experience really sucks. If you go through that experience and you are typing in and you're filling out that form, you're going to see it's not that great.

There are some people that you can follow if you want to learn some stuff about it.

One person that I learned a lot from in the early days has moved on and is talking about augmented reality, but a lot of his talk 2-5 years ago was about mobile, and in particular, smartphones and smart devices, is Luke W. It's @LukeW on Twitter, if you go look him up, go back a couple of years. He's spent a lot of time on augmented reality, more than he has on mobile, but go back a couple of years, look at some of his stuff, and you learn quite [00:08:00] a bit about what that mobile experience needs to be in terms of check out and stuff like that.

If you don't want to go and do all that research, a really good thing for you to do is just go through your process on your phone.

Go through the whole experience, from getting introduced, look at your Facebook ad if you're doing Facebook ads on your mobile phone. You can ask in ad manager for it to send you a link to your phone of your ad. Then you can look at your ad and you can click through it and go through the whole process on your mobile phone. As you do that, you're going to gain a greater appreciation for what you're asking people to do.

The other thing that happens with this that we don't think about is often, when we capture lead, we deliver or we send people to their email inbox. Asking somebody to go into their email inbox to get something in order to continue a flow that we have imagined will be continuous, not broken up, is pretty crazy if you think about it.

[00:09:00] I hesitate to even ask you to do this, but after you're done listening to the podcast episode, go look at your email inbox and tell me if you can stay focused. Tell me if you don't get distracted by a subject line or something.

And of course, from a marketing perspective you're like, "Yeah, I want to do that." But the thing is, there's probably hundreds, if not thousands, of emails vying for your attention in that email box. When we're asking someone to go through a sales process or a marketing process, we aren't usually thinking about the fact that we're asking them to go into a den of lions to go retrieve our message.

They're going in there and they're going to get distracted. Be conscientious of what the actual experience is, not the experience that you imagine it will be, but the actual experience that you're asking people to go through. As you go through that process, it'll probably reveal some things, some opportunities to do that you didn't realize we're sitting right in front of you.

As this mobile landscape has erupted, it has dramatically changed the [00:10:00] topography, or the way that the land is laid out. Chances are, your map hasn't fully updated to recognize that because your experiences remain somewhat consistent in working on a PC.

Again, the challenge is: go look at your marketing that you're already doing. Look at your existing sales processes and see if you're asking people to go through the den of lions in order for them to continue on that flow. If you are, what I'd encourage you to do is think about ways that you could bypass the email inbox in the initial portion of that experience.

One of the things that we obviously do at FixYourFunnel is texting and what we have done through our own experimentation on businesses that we have either interest in or consulting with is we'll change up that need to drive people to the Inbox and we'll try and encourage people to accept receiving things in the text inbox, which is significantly less crowded and has a lot fewer distractions going on.

We'll actually send that text, they'll get that [00:11:00] push notification because I don't know if you've noticed, but every single text message gives you a push notification unless you've set up your phone to do differently and by default, that's not how email works, but that is how texting works.

You get that push notification, you'll tap on that, and then, boom, you're right in the conversation. That's a more direct path for the most part on these messages you're sending out and then, boom, you can redirect them to another resource or you may be delivering the resource right there.

Whatever it is, we've bypassed one of the most dangerous places we can send people on their phone, which is the email inbox.

I hope that as you look at the landscape a little bit different with your updated map that you'll start considering, what are the ways that I could create that mobile experience that will actually keep people on the path I would like them to take in order for them to get the resolution to the problem that they're trying to resolve or the dream they're trying to pursue?

I hope this helps you, can't wait to share with you my next [00:12:00] episode where I'm going to go into what I consider to be the most important thing you need to know as a business owner, and interestingly enough, it has nothing to do with texting or technology (in some ways).

Until next time, this is Ryan Chapman. Keep moving forward.