On this episode of Proposify BizChat, I talk with entrepreneur and marketer Gary Nealon. Gary has built various multi-million dollar businesses, one of which was named amongst the top 500 fastest growing businesses in the US. He is an expert in ecommerce, and growth-hacked the kitchen industry with his company, RTA Cabinet Store, which is slated to do roughly $40 million in business this year alone. I talk to Gary about some sneaky Facebook group hacks to help with retargeting audiences, and how they keep competitors at bay.
What it’s about
In this interview, I talk to Gary about the importance of learning who your customer is, why you should use a variety of sources when it comes to pushing out content, and a sneaky way you can funnel your audience.
Takeaways
To stand out, learn who your customer is
In this day and age with so many companies on the market, if you want to stand out you need to have a plan. For RTA Cabinets, Gary says they decided to move away from what everyone else was doing with buying keywords to boost SEO, and instead dug into learning who their customers were.
“When we dug into the customer avatar, we realized we really have five different customers, not just one.”
Instead of using the same sales and marketing tools for everybody, Gary started segmenting them all into different groups, then used the language and the keywords they were already searching for, and spoke to their pain points.
“It completely changed our buying process and our conversion rates because people were feeling more connected to the company.”
Create content for your customers, by your customers
Gary says that in RTA Cabinet’s first few years, creating content came fairly easily to him, using his own curiosity about cabinets to fuel the content fire. To keep creating articles, videos, and blogs focused on the needs and wants of your customers, Gary suggests using your customers to supply the content.
“Anytime our customer service gets a phonecall or a question, they put it in a log, and we then create a video or an article about it. Those questions or concerns have become our content creation.”
Gary says this has helped them create content their customers are interested in, increased traffic to their product pages, and has helped boost their SEO on some pages of their website, because of Google’s more recent approach to intention-based search.
Don’t be dependant on only one traffic source
It’s like the old saying goes, don’t put your eggs in one basket. Gary says that in putting the majority of your content on one traffic source, you risk losing your audience if they shut down.
“Don’t be dependant on one traffic source. Amazon or eBay could shut you down tomorrow. Any of these companies can change their terms of service, and put you out of business.”
"Don’t be dependant on one traffic source. Amazon or eBay could shut you down tomorrow."
Instead, Gary suggests spreading your content across any platform that can bring in even a little bit of traffic, ensuring you don’t have an extremely dominant source.
Sometimes you have to bend the rules to fill your funnel
Staying ahead of your competition can be a daily challenge, but Gary says there are sneaky ways to target your ideal audience while keeping your competitors at bay.
“After figuring out who our ideal customers were, we started creating Facebook pages that were based on their hobbies. For the female of the house we would do cooking, gardening, and baking, and for the male it would be barbecuing, golf, and sports cars. The people engaging on these pages were still our target audience, but we’d then be able to start a conversation with them on a completely different platform other than cabinets.”
Gary says, because they were already targeting these people, they could then run retargeting ads to them for a lower cost, dropping their cost per acquisition significantly. It also helped them stay fresh in the minds of consumers who were not ready to buy, but might in the future.
“It not only has kept our competition away, but it’s allowed us to step outside the buying cycle and talk to these potential clients before they’re ready to buy, which is key for us.”
Show notes
