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The HaBO Village Podcast

5 Marketing Tips From Inbound [Podcast]

Episode 7: Michael and Kathryn recorded in Boston, MA while attending Hubspot’s INBOUND conference. The best of business, advertising and marketing, specifically inbound marketing professionals attend to hear from a variety of different speakers and experts. Michael and Kathryn learned so much from that conference that they decided to give you 5 tips for you to start implementing into your marketing strategy today!

Inbound Conference

Here is a quick glance at what was discussed in this episode:

  • Intro to the inbound marketing philosophy. 
  • Discuss content growth found online.
  • What is quality content and why is it important?
  • Understand what it means to have the disease of the expert.
  • Details of why mobile capability is crucial for websites.

 

We want your business to thrive as a business full of passion and provision. These 5 steps will help you refine your marketing strategy. In need of other ways to improve your business? Check out our other podcast episodes via iTunes or Stitcher.

 

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Michael:           Hi, this is Michael Redman, and welcome to the HaBO Village Podcast, where we're helping you build passion and provision companies. And this week, we're going to talk about internet marketing and some updates on internet marketing from a big national conference, and how that applies to the nine areas of business and growing a passion and provision company. Since one of those nine areas is marketing, an incredibly huge important part of it, and we've built a company over the last 14 years actually addressing marketing and business consulting. So we know how important this is, and we work on this on a regular basis, daily basis with our staff and our customers. So today's podcast, you're going to get some great tips. Matter of fact, you're going to get five tips.


Michael:
         So sit back, enjoy, go for your run, do your exercise, however you're taking us with you in your life and listening to this podcast. Let's get started. Hello everybody, and welcome to the HaBO Village Podcast. We appreciate you coming back, and we are doing this podcast from Boston, Massachusetts.


Kathryn:
         Sitting in a lovely Airbnb. We very much recommend Airbnbs on Beacon Hill. It's pretty spectacular.


Michael:
         Shout out to Airbnb and how great we think they are. We like staying at those a lot. Really nice. Just so you know, we're in a lovely little one bedroom with wood floors and a fireplace, right in the heart of the city. Just a block and a half, two blocks, off of Boston Commons.


Kathryn:
         And one of these awesome old buildings where you get into the elevator and you close the metal cross, what do they call that? A cross hatched door?


Michael:
         There's two doors in it. You got to close it and-


Kathryn:
         And then you push the button and you pray. It's pretty awesome.


Michael:
         The whole thing jerks and jumps, and it's just-


Kathryn:
         It's a great building.


Michael:
         Two people kind of barely fit.


Kathryn:
         Radiator heating, phenomenal.


Michael:
         So what are we going to talk about today? What's today's episode about?


Kathryn:
         Today is all about kind of just state of 2016 inbounds. So we are at a conference for HubSpot, which is one of our software partners, and HubSpot, I think probably about 2006 or so coined the term inbound marketing, as opposed to outbound marketing. If you're not familiar with inbound, I guess probably the first thing you need to know is that it's actually a philosophy. It's not just a methodology.


Michael:
         So why don't you tell everybody, where did inbound come from?


Kathryn:
         Where did it come from?


Michael:
         Who invented inbound?


Kathryn:
         Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.


Michael:
         They did, and they did it back in 2006 when they wrote a book.


Kathryn:
         Yep. They were at MIT and they wrote a book. They wrote software and they defined this new way of going after customers and doing marketing, and it was all about attracting customers instead of forcing information at them that they weren't looking for. So what does it look like to actually create content that people are looking for, therefore they are coming in to your side voluntarily as opposed to what they would call outbound traditional push marketing, where you're forcing your content in front of them in a place where they're not actually looking for you. So easy illustration, most of the time, unless it's a Super Bowl, you don't watch a television show for the commercials. The commercials interrupt it.


Kathryn:
         So they were looking for means and mechanisms based on how human beings interact and how they buy. What does it look like to actually be in a place where people are, and then to give them content that they're looking for so you are able to just be relevant and all of that good stuff? Tell us more about it Michael.


Michael:
         Well, I think you're right, you're right on. So inbound marketing, when you hear it, it's one of those terms for internet marketing. It's a style philosophy internet marketing as you said, and I think one of the things that's just real important is we'll use this term at times. We believe in radio, television advertising too, but the fact is some of the statistics are going down, and they are changing. Less people are watching television, more people have DVRs. More people are actually ... What they're doing is we're all, as a Western culture, watching TV more on our own timeline. So Netflix is a product, soon as that became popular and more people are using that, and they're-


Kathryn:
         Hulu, ABC on demand. I mean, everything is on demand.


Michael:
         One of the fancy terms that's used, and marketing and media always come up with fancy terms, is called time shifting. So you don't have to watch it. When we were kids growing up, Monday night, eight o'clock was whatever, and in the fall it was Monday Night Football. Tuesday night was something else at nine o'clock and at 10 o'clock, and that was it. Then there was VCRs, and then there was DVRs and now we can go out and watch something that's queued up on Hulu or Netflix or something like that online. And there's still commercials in some of them for sure.


Kathryn:
         Absolutely.


Michael:
         Especially on Hulu and things like that, or you can pay for a subscription like Netflix, you don't get commercials with Netflix. That kind of stuff is all happening, and that is a push or interruptive marketing, when I put a commercial there that you didn't want to. Inbound marketing is the idea that really was built around Google and search. And when you're going and looking for something, you're going and looking for answers, maybe you're looking for a new product, maybe you're looking for a solution. Heard a lecture today about a company who was selling products that were roughly about $100,000 a year, they had a three year contract. They were shocked when they started actually marketing and having search or Google show some of their website for some terms.


Michael:
         They ended up signing a $300,000 three year contract based on somebody who went out, searched for a company on Google and found them. The reason they were shocked is they didn't believe that anybody at that price point would go to Google looking for a company. Some of you listening are going to go, "Well, duh." And some of you are going to have that same, "You're kidding me. Somebody who's spending that much money went and found somebody on Google?" Yeah, that's part of the research process, and it's amazing how many of us are using Google for research. So that's an idea of inbound, because now as a consumer, I go out looking for an answer, I want to find it. And I don't care if it's a white paper, a commercial, anything, information on your product or service. I want to be able to consume the material you have about your product or service.


Michael:
         I want to consume reviews about your company, and that is an inbound because I'm actively searching as opposed to, I'm not paying any attention, and you're just trying to interrupt me doing what I'm doing, watching TV or listening to the radio or watching Facebook for that matter, at some level. What has shifted is the philosophy has gone to ... There really is television commercials, that even though they interrupt, they're written in a form that's more educational and helpful, inbound. They're there, and when somebody is looking for a new car, car commercials are relevant. When somebody's thinking about safety, because they now have young kids and they're looking for a new car, now facts about being safe and the car that's safe and the safety ratings that they have are relevant. So we've kind of seen that inboundy is the term that's going around.


Michael:
         Now, it's a marketing term, but that's the thing, this is such a new terrain in the last few years, there's not a lot of language, right? So what has happened is inbound, the term, was started by HubSpot Marketing. It goes along with content marketing and trying to get found in search results and everything like that. But there are some things that have really shifted, because over the last few years, people have caught on to this, and content has radically skyrocketed on the internet. There's, some people say, 80% more content today on the internet than there was two years ago.


Kathryn:
         80% more than there was two years ago, so it's grown exponentially is what you're saying.


Michael:
         Let's say it in another way. 80% of all content on the internet is new in the last 24 months.


Kathryn:
         Which is super, super stunning. So for several years, when we began adopting this approach, and really working with our clients, because we still do radio and TV, but we've been working with our clients over the last several years to create lots of content. So we do a lot of blog writing, we create white papers and ebooks, and that has been amazing and we have seen incredible growth in our clients websites by creating content that people are looking for. So we've seen the evidence of this happening, but it's slowing down because the content war is on. There's so much content.


Michael:
         That's a good way of putting it, content war.


Kathryn:
         So everybody caught on to this, which is why you've got 100,000 blogs. You might realize this or you might not, but when you go and you search in Google, typically what happens is that the initial SERP, which is the search engine results page, that initial page of results, bunches of those are not actual website URLs, they're blogs that then could lead you to a website. So there are articles that are placed on people's websites, but you're actually going to the article not to the homepage or the about us page on somebody's website. So that's part of how you get people to draw into your website is you create content they're looking for, to then pull them in.


Michael:
         Right, and a blog is a part of the website now?


Kathryn:
         Yes.


Michael:
         It's part of the website structure. We want to make sure we're not confusing there. As a little bit of a disclaimer, as we've been growing our agency and our company and working with folks and doing the marketing aspects, one of the things that's happened is we knew that it was incredibly important for us to grow and serve our customers and stay current and be able to stay on top of all the technology and strategy issues coming along, that we started building partnerships and relationships with certain companies. So one of the things that has happened a lot, you may or may not be aware of this, in the current business market is software companies are important, and a lot of times too, especially in marketing, you need a software partner.


Michael:
         We actually became certified partners with HubSpot four or five years ago.


Kathryn:
         In 2012.


Michael:
         Yeah, 2012, so four years ago. So we resell their software, that's one of the disclaimers, because we looked around for a very long time and we needed something that we could leverage, and good software allowed us to leverage our time and our clients budget. And we actually reduced by a factor of two or three times the amount of hours we were spending just holding software together, and HubSpot helped. It also helped because they were a large company that had values that were similar to ours, and so we became certified partners. Today we're certified gold partners with them, so there's a little bit of disclaimer there. But what happens is we're involved at least twice a year in conferences because of the level of partnership we have.


Michael:
         Every fall, they have their annual inbound marketing conference. We started coming four years ago, there was about 5000 people at the conference.


Kathryn:
         It was at the Hynes Convention Center downtown, and then they outgrew that.


Michael:
         They outgrew it, and it's been growing exponentially. This year, they had 19,000 members.


Kathryn:
         19,000 people who came to the conference, incredible.


Michael:
         Yeah, that's actually more accurate, not members. And in the midst of that, they're not all HubSpot users. There's only probably 2000 HubSpot partners, I think, in the midst of it. A lot of them are just beginning in their journey. That said, these are people that come from all over the place just to see what's going on in marketing. To be a part of conferences for the week and to hear speakers talk about it. And because HubSpot is traded on the New York Stock Exchange now, they are a large company with a lot of resources. The trends and everything else they have just allow us to have access to these things faster. So what we're going to do today ...


Michael:
         That was a long lead in, but it was really important because we're going to talk about what we believe are really five takeaways, five updates in the internet marketing world. If you're not marketing on the internet at all, if you don't have a website, at least a website, then you are dramatically hindering your potential for marketing and growing your company. And when you hinder your ability to make money and bring in customers and clients, you also hinder your ability for the total passion and provision. So we really want to encourage that, talk about that today. These are things that are just real valuable. So let's get in and talk about these. Number one, ads are absolutely important now, to amplify your content. What do we mean by that Kathryn?


Kathryn:
         So we said earlier that 80% of the content created has been created in the last two years on the internet, so there is a ton of content. So the driving question always in marketing is how do I get in front of people? How do I just be where I need to be so I can be seen? And this is a bit of a shift because inbound, as we described the philosophy earlier, which was really important stage for this, inbound has been about creating content and having it findable so people will come to you. We actually were hearing them say from their presentations and from the main founders of the company, you absolutely need to start using ads, especially Facebook ads to amplify your content.


Kathryn:
         A big piece of that is because it's getting harder and harder to be found. So if you have a piece of content that's really valuable, you need to be doing at least things like boosting your posts, throwing a few dollars behind a post to boost it and see if you can get some traction, and then all the way through actually doing full hardcore Facebook advertising. So that's brand new because that doesn't feel very inboundy, it feels more inabruptive because you're just wanting to get into people's Facebook feeds. But the reality is if you're doing it well and you're doing it with relevance and you're creating good content, which we'll talk about in a minute, that then it's just going to become a critical piece of the puzzle.


Kathryn:
         I think the other thing they said which was pretty sort of wow when you think about it is right now, the cost per thousand, that we call it CPM in marketing is about $5 on Facebook. The prediction is that because people are catching on, and the larger marketing corporations are catching on, within three or four years, that same price will be about $30. So now's the time to get into doing Facebook advertising and promoting your content because it's still affordable to do it. Our audience is small businesses, and so we want you to get in early so you don't lose the opportunity to do that before the big marketing and the big budget people ruin it for us.


Michael:
         Huge opportunity right now to leverage your investment, huge opportunity. Matter of fact, one of the folks that we studied under to understand how to do Facebook advertising more and Facebook video ads more, they're supposedly the third largest investor on Facebook ads right now. They spend about $20,000 a day for their customers.


Kathryn:
         So that would be grouped together. So a bunch of customers advertising on Facebook and the net collective of what they're purchasing as an organization is 20,000 a day.


Michael:
         A day, which is 6.5, $6.7 million a year roughly.


Kathryn:
         Huge.


Michael:
         It's a fair amount of money. Now what's happening is some of you may be thinking, "That's not that much," because I've already talked to a couple of people this week about that, but what's not happening is Coca Cola is not taking over the advertising. IBM is not taking over the advertising on Facebook.


Kathryn:
         And these are people that could spend 15, 20, 30 million a year if they were putting money towards it. So they will drive up the cost dramatically once they start really paying attention to this.


Michael:
         It's going to be really interesting to watch. So just the very first point, ads and online advertising is actually really important. We tell our clients all the time, in the last two years, it's changed. And the big thing that's changed is that there are more companies offering good products, advertising products, which means there's more competition, and that's been healthy online, because for a long time there was only one place to do it, and that was in search, or just banner ads in places. I just want you to know, if you're going to do this, it's absolutely critical that you actually start thinking about it and putting part of your advertising budget towards online ads, and we really like Facebook.


Michael:
         The word on the street right now is that Twitter is overpriced. So as of the week of the election, 2016 election, Twitter is right now just not the best investment for you, because there's just too many eyeballs and it's too expensive to get in and be seen but Facebook is still a great deal. Let's move on to point number two. Kathryn, what is that?


Kathryn:
         So point number two is that the quality of content is more important than ever.


Michael:
         What do you mean by that?


Kathryn:
         Funny you should ask.


Michael:
         Thank you very much.


Kathryn:
         One of the things that happens early in the adoption curve is that people can just throw content at something. They can create a video, they can create piece of written content, and the quality isn't as important when not everybody's doing it, right? So the fewer people that are doing something, in some senses, you can get away with a lot because you're doing something novel, you're doing something unique. Well nowadays, what we're hearing is that it's becoming more and more important. We would say it always has been because good grief, if you're not going to do with excellent stuff, don't do it. But the reality is the quality of content is becoming more critical, because people are ...


Kathryn:
         There's so much content available that they're now really beginning to differentiate between content that delivers what it's promising and content that's just crap, for a lack of a better word, crap.


Michael:
         Okay. In my head, I hear this question that's coming about if I'm listening to this, because I want to be careful we're not just assuming terms and definitions, what the heck does content mean? What do we mean by content? Let's make sure we're really clear with that if it hasn't been caught already in this podcast.


Kathryn:
         So it could be your written content, it could be a ebook you create, it could be a blog, it could be a video piece. Basically, anything that you are putting out in front of your viewers is content, so it could be anything.


Michael:
         Yeah, exactly. So one of the strategies that-


Kathryn:
         Could be an ad.


Michael:
         One of the strategies we've had for a long time is writing blogs, because that will help you gain rankings and get more traffic from the search engines. We've done it for years. It's a really good strategy. It's gotten harder to increase, and your growth isn't as fast because everybody's caught on to it. But it used to be all you do is literally, if you got in early enough you could write blogs that were 250 words. And if you just did it four, five, six times a week and just wrote that, and you could sit down in an hour and write all those out and post them every day, you would grow and get an amazing amount of traffic and Google would see that as valuable. Then it went to 500 words and then 500 to 750 words.


Michael:
         What happened is they wanted more quantity but Google started being able to adjust and measure quality. And what they wanted to do is they always wanted quality for human beings, but it turned out Google would show stuff out that maybe wasn't the most relevant to me or wasn't the best written or it was a lot of fluff. Maybe it was a lot of marketing fluff or maybe it was just somebody ... When you read something and somebody writes, and they can write 1000 words that's like, "Wow, there's a lot of great content in there, and I understand it, and there's jokes, and there's relevance and everything else." And there's others you go, "I just read that thousand words, and I feel like they didn't say anything." That's the difference between quality of content as it makes sense. You might call it trash.


Michael:
         So what's really happening in today's world, and we're saying it came out this week, we're seeing all five of these things that we're sharing with you today, we're seeing in our own practice, with our clients, with ourself. And we're already implementing them because they've been coming down the road. We've been using ads. We're improving quality, but now we're getting forced to actually spend more money on quality, because we're required to, we have to. There's that balance between how good does it have to be. We want it to be decent, right Kathryn?


Kathryn:
         Right.


Michael:
         But do I have to spend two hours on it? If an hour is a good enough time for the market, well, we spend an hour. But now it's becoming more important to spend more time, more energy. And video is one of those things. So our third point is not only is it quality, we've kind of alluded to this, but relevant content is way more important. You see this in places where advertising is happening and mixing with journalism and everything else. People are trying to be more relevant to the type of content you're reading, so you may advertise in certain places that are more relevant to your product. Some B2B companies will advertise in journals, because the content and what they're offering is more relevant to those people.


Michael:
         But the other thing that's happening is people are just not putting up with something that doesn't matter to them. And in this world, with internet marketing, you can actually not only write content that's more relevant, but you can actually by targeting way more, so that it's more relevant. Sometimes it's a good thing, and sometimes it's a bad thing, but the biggest point here that we want to make is when you're doing your own marketing, it's got to be relevant. That's the biggest key, and that'll actually influence your quality. The more relevant it is, it can be simple. It can be written at an eighth grade or a sixth grade level, but if it's relevant to me, then it has value because it matters, and you just have to be paying attention to this.


Michael:
         If you're hiring or working with an agency, marketing people, anybody who calls themself a marketer, [inaudible 00:23:26], just make sure that you're looking at it going, what's relevant to your customers? What do they want? Answer questions that they're asking. It's just becoming more and more important, because the competition is becoming more and more steep and extreme.


Kathryn:
         Well, when we talk about marketing as one of our nine core areas of business, the reality is that if you're running a business, you will have what every business leader has, which is what we refer to as the disease of the expert. And the disease of the expert is the reality that you want people to be asking certain questions that they don't even know are relevant questions, because they don't understand what you understand about your area or your expertise. So you're trying to answer questions for them that they're not asking. So the question you have to discover, and this is what we do with clients all the time is within your area, your product, your service, what wakes people up in the morning that you're solving? What's their pain point? What are the questions they're asking?


Kathryn:
         What are the things that just rattle them? That make them need your solution? And if you're not answering those questions, then you're not relevant. So this whole issue of relevance, and we could go on for days and days, and maybe another podcast will, but the issue of relevance really is about, are you answering the questions that people are asking? And are you answering them in ways and posing your content and positioning in ways that make sense to people?


Michael:
         Yeah, so one last point on relevance, and this is just a tip, avoid acronyms.


Kathryn:
         Absolutely.


Michael:
         Please avoid acronyms. I sat in more seminars this week where ... I'm a seasoned professional. We know what we're doing. We've been doing this a long time, and we stay on the top trends regularly. I got people using terms and I'm like, "What are you talking about?" I had to go out to the internet while I'm sitting there in this class and search for these terms, because I had no idea what they were talking about.


Kathryn:
         And I'm asking Michael, "What does that mean? What is that? I don't understand that."


Michael:
         It happened probably three or four times this week.


Kathryn:
         Terrible. Don't assume people know what you're talking about.


Michael:
         It's part of the disease of the expert. And actually, you will not be condescending if you say it, as opposed to use the acronym. Acronyms can be dangerous, because you don't always know who knows the acronym and who doesn't.


Kathryn:
         Point number four.


Michael:
         Point number four is video is important, and video is more important now than ever. What's the consumption rate on Facebook at the moment?


Kathryn:
         I don't know the exact consumption rate. I know that one of the graphs that we saw today, and it flashed by so I'm not going to quote it exactly. But essentially, it looked at the video consumption on Facebook and Instagram, and in the last, I think it's a year or two years.


Michael:
         Just in the last year.


Kathryn:
         Just in the last year, that consumption rate has exceeded what people are watching on YouTube. So that's stunning, because YouTube has been for ... Well, I was going to say historically, but it hasn't been around that long. But YouTube has been the place to watch video, right? And now people are consuming tons and tons of video on Instagram and Facebook. We've got Facebook Live, we've got video posting in Facebook. All of that is happening, and people are watching it, and cameras on phones. I mean, it's just anybody can take a video. So we're going to say that quality matters, and that's a really important piece of video, but the fact of the matter is you need to be creating video content for your company. It's got to happen.


Michael:
         Yeah. Look at your market, look at what other people are doing in the midst of it, and you're going to start seeing what needs to be done quality wise and whatnot. If you're new to video, or even if you've been doing it a little while, there are different types of quality, different levels of quality that are acceptable under different circumstances. I did a live Facebook video this week on one of our Facebook channels, and it's in a noisy room, it's on my phone, the sound isn't great, it doesn't look like our high quality commercials or corporate videos or anything like that, it was perfect. It was great. People liked it. They consumed it. They got the message, where we were, and that was fine.


Michael:
         It was contextually appropriate.


Kathryn:
         Correct.


Michael:
         And that is key for a lot of folks. And right now, some of you may or may not know Gary Venda ...


Kathryn:
         It's Vaynerchuk.


Michael:
         Vaynerchuk.


Kathryn:
         V-A-Y-N-E-R-C-H-U-K, Vaynerchuk.


Michael:
         I always mess up. He's Russian. His family are Russian immigrants.


Kathryn:
         He's the wine guy.


Michael:
         If you've never heard of the wine guy, the wine guy out of college, his family had a wine distribution company that made about $3 million a year, he went online and started showing videos of tasting different wines, and he would do it a few times a week. And he literally did that for five, six years and converted a $3 million company to a $60 million a year company. I mean, he did a lot of things, but that was his main stay was he did this multiple times a week, short videos on wine and everything else. So the power is there. There's lots of different examples. We use video a lot in what we do at work, a lot of different types of video, and we see engagement go up and the statistics across the board are bearing that too.


Michael:
         Engagement in your content goes up when you use video, and it's just going to become more and more important, not just using it but having good quality video. So get an expert, get somebody to work with, get some help on that. That's your number four tip. Number five-


Kathryn:
         Just a hint too before we move off that, really fast.


Michael:
         Yeah.


Kathryn:
         If you're doing video on Facebook, because people are watching it silent most of the time, if there's a way that you can easily and quickly overlay text onto your video, so that they can see what it is you're talking about, that will help a ton. Because most people are never going to click through to the audio if the video doesn't actually engage them and they can't see what it's about. So text is super helpful.


Michael:
         Yeah. Facebook has a transcription tool. It's pretty good. It's getting better. YouTube has one too, I think, and it's amazing what they're pulling off of that and translating it for people, but that's a huge point right there. Think about creating videos at some level with a bit of a filter that says it's going to be a silent film.


Kathryn:
         Back to the silent movie.


Michael:
         Somebody showed a clip of silent films this week of Charlie Chaplin and I was struck by how super animated and how much he moved his arms and his body and everything else to help tell the story, because all there was was music and every once in a while a subtitle in a Chaplin film.


Kathryn:
         Okay. So one, ads are absolutely important to amplify your content. Two, quality of content is more important than ever. Three, relevant content is super critical. Four, video matters a ton. And then five, which is maybe my favorite, I don't know. I learned this this morning, and it just made me laugh, is that five ... No, excuse me. We were talking about millennials, and we were talking about the attachment that we have to our iPhones, and the guy who was doing the demonstration basically said, "Okay, help me understand-"


Michael:
         This was a good illustration.


Kathryn:
         "Help me understand how attached you are to your iPhone." So he made us switch our iPhone with our neighbors, or our regular phone, whatever, I'm assuming an iPhone because I have one, but-


Michael:
         A cellphone.


Kathryn:
         ... "Switch your smartphone, give it away. Let your neighbor have it. How does that feel?" Five minutes later, "How are you feeling?" Everybody's freaking out.


Michael:
         The entire room erupted with uncomfortable giggling and laughter.


Kathryn:
         So they had done a survey, and I can't tell you who because I couldn't see his slide close enough, I'll look it up later. But they did a survey with millennials asking them, would they rather lose a finger or their phone? And the answer was just stunning. The first one was kind of funny. It was like 45% of all millennials said that they would rather lose a finger than be separated from their phone.


Michael:
         45%?


Kathryn:
         45%.


Michael:
         They'd totally give up their phone.


Kathryn:
         They would have their finger hacked off before they would give up their phone. And then more humorously, if they owned an iPhone, it went up to 59%. So nearly 60% of millennials said they would rather lose a finger than have their iPhone taken away from them.


Michael:
         So what's the point of this fact? And why is this important?


Kathryn:
         You really probably should make sure your ads are mobile native and your website's mobile, because doggone it, they're very attached.


Michael:
         So wait, this is really important. Mobile is just increasing more and more. If you haven't thought about it, smartphones are everywhere. Kathryn's step mom who is in her mid 70s right now.


Kathryn:
         Just turned 75.


Michael:
         She just got rid of the flip phone and just got an iPhone.


Kathryn:
         Scares her, but she did it.


Michael:
         She's working on it. She's working hard. But what you have is you have all these people who have smartphones, and it's just permeating the market, and people are used to looking and consuming content on their phone. You've got to make it so they can consume it online. Online being on the desktop, laptop, iPad-


Kathryn:
         Tablet.


Michael:
         ... tablet, and-


Kathryn:
         Phone.


Michael:
         ... on phone. There are easy ways to address that. It's amazing how many people have it.


Kathryn:
         Stunning.


Michael:
         It has to happen-


Kathryn:
         United Airlines has not yet addressed it.


Michael:
         Well, they have an app. We had a problem with the United Airlines-


Kathryn:
         Whatever.


Michael:
         ... so we're not really big fan of theirs today. We're not endorsing United Airlines at all.


Kathryn:
         Maybe tomorrow, we'll see how they do.


Michael:
         I hope their customer service comes through. But other than that, the whole fact of this idea that 59% of millennial iPhone owners would rather give up a finger than give up their phone, hypothetically speaking.


Kathryn:
         Unbelievable. Nobody had an ax out probably. Nobody was asking for it, but still-


Michael:
         But still, it goes to-


Kathryn:
         One of the responders said, "The phone is an integral part of my life, my pinky, not so much."


Michael:
         So in the midst of this, what we're saying is mobile is absolutely important. Now, this has been something we've been talking about for three or four years, specifically for the last two, because a couple of years ago, Google made a major decision that if your website wasn't mobile ready, you lose points in the rankings. It's a scoring system. They have a scorecard. They score websites, if you don't know this. And you lose points for your website not being able to shift between being formatted for a desktop, a tablet, and a phone. And so that's really important. But the other thing is designing ads for phones. As we go back to point one, ads are important, and being able to design ads so that they work on the phones.


Michael:
         Those are your five things today. And later on, we're going to talk about, as we go on in future episodes, other updates for your marketing, because we like marketing a lot. But when we're talking about passion and provision companies, when we're here to encourage you, support you, and believe that it's possible for you to have a passion and provision company that thrives both financially, relationally, emotionally for you and your employees, and even your customers, that kind of stuff can exist. And that it doesn't have to be all about $1, and it doesn't have to be all about just the business. This is possible, and these are the things you need to do, and you can do, because you want to have competence and skill in the nine areas of business. And in marketing, you need to understand internet marketing.


Michael:
         We hope you enjoyed today's episode. We're going to sign off from Boston. And we really, really would like it if you would go out and like us and rate us on iTunes. Also, if you want to go to our show notes page on halfabubbleout.com, and look under the HaBO Village Podcast, you'll find the show notes for the show, and any kind of resources maybe that as we put it together we'll throw up there for you. And listen to any of our other cast. Tell other people about it. So thank you very much. We hope that you're building a passion and provision company and you have a great day.


Kathryn:
         Thank you so much.


Michael:
         Bye bye.


Kathryn:
         Bye bye.