Eric: Welcome back to The Experience Pros Radio Show with Angel and Eric. Very nice to have you along with us today. Very exciting, it’s New Year.
Angel: It is New Year. It’s a new you — a clean slate. We’re all back to work. We’re all excited and ready to go. So, of course, we brought in the most excited person we know about, helping you grow your business — Darrell Stern, the President of Stern, LLC. Responsive web design, inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and all-around great guy. Darrell, welcome back.
Darrell Stern: Boom, 2017.
Eric: Happy new year!
Darrell: We got to go to prom this year.
Eric: Wait, what?
Darrell: She’s not 16 anymore. It’s 2017. Now we get to go to prom with our new—with our new century.
Angel: Did you see the name of…oh, what was it from The Sound of Music, “16 going on 17”?
Eric: All right.
Darrell: 16—right, “I am 16, going on 17.” Exactly.
Angel: Here we are. Here we are.
Eric: Darrell, what’s on your mind today?
Darrell: Well, what’s on my mind today is, over the past two years, I’ve been doing a lot of brand strategy work and copywriting work with my new clients and my current clients. I call it Stern Storming.
Eric: Sure.
Darrell: Which is—musicians jam out using a guitar and, you know, drums, and they do a music jam, and everybody pretty much knows what that is.
Eric: Sure.
Darrell: And what I do is open up Google Docs and talk to you about your back story, the story of your business. We get into the stories of the benefits to your business — and we do a writing jam. We literally have a writing jam session, where we’re gonna collaborate and write better copy for all of your marketing.
Eric: Sounds amazing.
Angel: I think that, for many business owners, we don’t take a lot of time to go back into our story. And when we do, we create our website and all of the moving parts. Visually, we can get it to look like what we want it to look like, but if we don’t have the content nailed down, and the messaging right on, people are gonna check out our website and bounce right off of it.
Darrell: One of the things that I say over and over again is, “Write the book. Then design the cover.” Because immediately, when I talk to people, they wanna talk about the front page of their website.
“I want this, and I want a slide show, and I want this and I want that,” and I say, “Well, we don’t know what that’s gonna be yet. We gotta write — we’ve gotta figure out our sales funnels. We’ve gotta figure out the main reason why your clients are doing business with you. What is the main way that they’re going to understand these are the benefits of what you do, and these are the needs and desires, these are the problems that you can solve?” Right?
Eric: So, Darrell, how do you get there? I mean, let’s put that into practice.
Darrell: Okay, well, the first thing that we do is I will open up a document, and I will have a bunch of columns on it that say “Features, benefits, needs, desires and patterns.” Okay, so, a feature—well, you start with features because you know what your features are, and most people are always talking about their features, but we’re a radio show. We’re two hours long. We, talk about, you know, business. Okay, those are the features, but what’s the benefit and the aftermath of having listened to this show?
Angel: Okay, so it’s motivating. It’s a community. It’s—I mean, am I on the right track?
Darrell: Well right, I mean, every episode that you guys do, somebody came on here and taught us something, and we learned something. We learned something new. We learned a fact. We learned something about something new in business. You might have a great accountant on here, and they teach you something about accounting.
Eric: Sure.
Darrell: So, if that happens, then we talk about, “Okay, well, what’s the reverse engineering of that?” In other words, here’s the feature. Here’s the benefit. Here’s what they taught, right, but what question would someone ask so then that’s the answer to?
Angel: Okay.
Darrell: So to attract someone to this segment of the episode…
Angel: Which is what people would be googling and searching for, asking about.
Darrell: Right, would be searching for and googling for, “How do I manage payroll” or “What happened with the employment tax code in Colorado this year.” So I would say, “Hey, you know, learn from this expert about the Colorado changes in the tax code this year” or something like that. And someone goes, “Wow, yeah, this is exactly what I need to know. What — there’s a change in that? I didn’t know there was.”
Angel: Yeah. Oh, what an important piece of that column, Darrell, because I think we understand, okay, rather than talk about the features, we should talk about the benefits, but even that next step of getting people—driving people to our website that are having that question, I think that’s the piece. That right there, it’s this solid pillar to what’s missing.
Darrell: Right, well, I would say, if you want our services, don’t work with me because I’m not gonna do it that way. I mean, the menus of our website say things like, you know, “Gain more customers,” or “Increase your ROI,” or—we worked with a company that makes a robots and then picks the best robot for your assembly line, you know, and it was, “Improve your cycle time,” as one of our menu items because this was a main need in that industry.
Eric: Right.
Darrell: The benefit they don’t even know. Are they gonna install a robot? They don’t even know that yet, but they know that they’re falling behind in their manufacturing cycle time. This is an issue that they need to solve. So you come in, and you look. You can even glance at the top of the website and say, “Well, yeah, that’s a problem that we’re having.” Click. Oh, wow, you can fix it.
Angel: And the nice thing of — about your background — and your experience in working with companies, Darrell, is your ability to draw out this information from a business owner. You would think that it would just roll off of our tongues, but we are so in the grind that we’re not thinking this way.
Eric: Absolutely.
Angel: And, of course, then it’s almost like we forget how to think about our business from a searching point of view.
Darrell: Well, you wanna tell us what we do. So, I talk to people who say to me over and over again, “But we’re doing that. We are doing that. We do say that. We say that over and over again,” and I say, “Well, maybe we’re saying it wrong, or we can say it in a different way, or we can switch the words around, or maybe there’s a better word to describe that.”
Eric: Yeah, if you’re not getting the results that you’re looking for—
Darrell: If you’re not getting the results, then let’s change something. Let’s change the language. Let’s change the language that we’re using because language is really where everything goes. When you write even a Facebook post or a tweet or something like that, if it’s poetry, if it’s dramatic, if it moves me emotionally… Well, what are the hashtags? What are the mentions? What are the things that are in the industry that are trending and combine that with words that really pull—you know, pull at your heart strings and make you go, “Wow, this is what I need.”
Angel: And even if you are attracting customers and you feel like, okay, we’re getting the wrong customers, or they’re not getting it, or they don’t understand what we’re doing, then—somebody had say, “Well, if they’re missing the mark, it’s in your messaging. You’re putting that in their space.”
Darrell: Now, I have a joke, and it’s just a joke, okay?
Angel: Okay.
Darrell: When I first met you guys—
Eric: Is it suitable for the FCC?
Darrell: Yes, it is suitable.
Eric: Okay.
Darrell: So, when I first met you guys, you kept saying, “Well, make me more visible. You make me more visible,” and I said, “But you’re on the radio.”
Angel: [laughs]
Darrell: You kept on saying “visibility,” and then you’d say “be on the radio.”
Angel: Which is—
Darrell: And I go, “Well, how am I visible on a radio?” That’s all. All I’m saying is that—that word or the way that you’re twisting the way you’re saying that, we might be able to tinker with just that part, right?
Angel: Mm hm.
Darrell: Now, for me, having joined The Experience Pros, I gained the experience that I needed to become a true business professional. To me, the experience of, and also working with professionals and getting the guidance from professionals — you have Facebook group, where I can ask any question about anything — the growth of my business — and there’s somebody there who has more experience than me in that particular area that can help answer my question. When I go to the leads group, it’s not just people that are just handing me a lead because they have to and it’s all rigid and structured and all that. These are people that are actually pulling me aside and saying, “You know, when you did that, you should probably do that differently,” or, “Let me give you some advice, you know, along the way—along your journey of building your business,” and that is so valuable.
Angel: Right, so you don’t have to recreate the wheel and sit there and struggle. It’s actually—people are gonna help you along.
Darrell: Right, so you guys, this is really an experience. It’s the experience of pushing yourself into the professional world of business, and that’s what the benefit has been for me. So, if we reverse engineer that, I came here six years ago. I didn’t know anybody. Four years ago, when I joined up with you guys, I didn’t know anybody here. So it wasn’t just, you know, going out and being visible. It was—it was, all of a sudden, I had the experience of meeting people that I needed to meet that I didn’t even know that I needed to meet, you know, to grow my business and to gain the experiences that I need to really run. Last year was the first year—the past two years —I’ve dreamt of having a marketing agency, where I managed big, huge projects and have people working with me and—and coordinating all this — blogs and videos and tweets and the whole thing — and I got to do it, and it’s all because of you guys, and that has been so invaluable to me, and every day, I’m learning more, and I’m getting more experience from the group and from you guys that are teaching me along the way because this is a constant learning process. So, to me, the brand with all of this, is, hey, not just get on radio and be visible, but learn how to be on the radio. I mean, learn, feel, have the experience of doing this because the first time, you might go, “Oh, my gosh, you know, how do you do that?”
Angel: [laughs]
Darrell: So you do it again, and you do it again, and you get the advice, until, finally, you know, this experience is now something that’s now under your belt, you know, and you might get invited to go on other radio shows or podcasts and all that. And ‘Boom!’ you have that experience.
Angel: And ‘boom,’ you have that experience. Well, we love watching your journey.
Eric: Absolutely.
Angel: Lots more coming out of the Stern Marketing Agency this year, but you can schedule your own three-hour Stern Storming Session with Darrell. I highly recommend it.
Eric: Absolutely.
Angel: Darrell, how do people connect with you? How do they schedule their own Stern Storming Session?
Darrell: Well, we launched a whole new landing page for Stern Storming. It’s at http://sternstorming.com, or you can just give me a call at 303-353-4354.
Eric: Do that phone number one more time.
Darrell: 303-353-4354.
Angel: No matter where he is—
Eric: That’s Darrell Stern.
Angel: No matter where you are in the country, you can Stern Storm.
Eric: Absolutely. Darrell, thanks for, joining us. We appreciate you and your input. Folks, don’t go anywhere. We’ve got more positive business talk right after these messages. You’re listening to Angel and Eric and Darrell Stern on The Experience Pros Radio Network.