The Rule of 26 | Michael Buzinski

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Michael Buzinski, CEO of Buzzworthy Marketing. Michael is a decorated US Air Force veteran, serial entrepreneur, digital marketing thought leader, international speaker, bestselling author and host of the top 1% podcast, The Buzzworthy Marketing Show. He has built several small businesses to multimillion dollar ventures and marketed over 1,200 companies. Michael has even been dubbed a marketing visionary by the American Marketing Association. He's here today to talk about why small business owners struggle with marketing and The Rule of 26. Michael, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Michael Buzinski: Thank you for having me. David McBee: I'm so grateful to have you here. So let's just get right to it. What is the problem with small business owners struggling with marketing? What are they doing wrong? Michael Buzinski: They're ignoring their online presence. This seems like such a weird thing to be talking about in the year of our lord, 2024, is that we still have small business owners that ... I literally had a client, he's a painter. I give you an example, just happened a couple of weeks ago. He's a painter, really good painter, and he thinks all his clients come from word of mouth and referrals, which is true. His marketing is word of mouth and referrals. Unfortunately, what he's missing is the fact that his website is where 68% of those referrals and word of mouth folks come through before they contact him. He just doesn't understand that people don't just take their neighbor's word for it. They want to find out. "Bob said Jack is a really good painter. All right, well, let's go see what Jack's all about. Do I want to do business with Jack?" And this is the big misnomer and this guy actually shut off his website. He's like, "I don't use it." I was like, "It's not yours to use. It's your potential clients to use." But there's still people out there that feel that their online presence doesn't mean anything to their business. David McBee: It's funny, I remember a long time ago I was talking to a sign manufacturer and his slogan was, "A business without a sign is a sign of no business." And even though the sign doesn't draw business in, the sign isn't what motivates people to buy from them, you can't have a business without a sign if you have a brick and mortar. Or if in a case of a painter, I'll bet he's got his name on his truck or his van, right? Michael Buzinski: Huge, painted nice and big with his ... Well, I'm pretty sure he didn't put his website on it. He just had his phone number. I'm like, "Nobody remembers your phone number, so they're going to look you up. And now you don't have a website, so they're not going to be able to find you. But you know what they're going to find? Your competitors." David McBee: So I think he's kind of in the minority. Wouldn't you agree that most small business owners at least have a website, but tend to ignore it? Michael Buzinski: Back in the 2000s when we first started building websites for other people, it was the digital brochure. And like you said, it's like a business without a sign is a sign of no business. Your website is a sign on the digital highway and this is the most crowded highway out there. So just having a sign, hanging your shingle, if you will, your digital shingle if you will, is not enough anymore. So I still think that the majority of business owners neglect their websites, even though they might have one or they've had one. How many times have you heard of business owners talking about, "Yeah, I got a website. Man, we haven't looked at that in years." David McBee: Yeah, that happens a lot. Michael Buzinski: You hear that way too often. Way too often. David McBee: So is that where the rule of 26 comes in? Michael Buzinski: 100%. See, I feel that when I wrote the book, it was right in the middle of the pandemic and then all of a sudden everybody realized how important a website was, right? And so people came around to it, but they were so afraid of marketers and all the things that are being thrown at them in digital marketing. And so I wanted to create a way to simplify how the business owner from their perspective can approach their website marketing without it being overwhelming. So I dove way deep into what we all love and cherish, which are KPIs, key performance indicators. Every marketer has their favorite bucket. The problem is that you got places like HubSpot that tout 129 KPIs. Who is looking at 129 KPIs, even for their clients? As professionals, we don't. And so I really wanted to find out what KPIs actually matter to our clients or to just business owners, period. And that it all came down to revenue. Every client you've ever worked with, the only thing they really care about is increased revenue. They want return on investment. So I said, "Okay, what KPIs actually directly move the revenue needle?" And the top three that I found that had the most impact were traffic, their website conversion rate and their average revenue per client. And when I was looking at that, I realized that if you increased each of these three KPIs by 26%, you actually get twice the revenue. So what is that, 78%? No, no, I'm sorry. 68%, something like that. 26 times three. I should know this, right? 78% of effort, of output gives a leveraged output of twice the revenue. And that helps business owners to go, "Okay, well, then how do I increase each of those?" Now we only have three conversations to have versus 129. David McBee: So now it's just how do we get more traffic? What was the second one? Michael Buzinski: Conversion rates. David McBee: Get more people who visit the website to buy the product and get people to spend a little bit more on whatever they're buying, right? Michael Buzinski: Mm-hmm. And for us, we did it for service-based businesses, so we are looking at how do we increase your lifetime value? When we talk about ARCP, average revenue per client, I got it, we look at one year. The first year, not their entire lifetime. So their average revenue per client at the one year mark. How can we engage them and not necessarily pay more for their services or maybe engage for more services? A lot of people undercharge for their services. I had one client who was a fractional CFO charging $1,500 a month for a fractional CFO. I'm like, "You're going to go broke." And I had to work that through, but we created a framework that he was actually able to go from $32,000 a year per client signed to $90,000 per year per client signed. And he's holding onto those clients longer because he's able to actually get better results because he's charging enough to do the job right. So that's just one example of how we can increase our average revenue per client and we only need 26%. David McBee: Okay, so here on Simpli.fi TV, we talk a lot about marketing. Were there any just flat out marketing techniques that helped you achieve those goals? Michael Buzinski: 100%. When I wrote the book, I started with traffic, ended with ARPC. The problem is that I should have wrote the book the other way around. The one marketing thing that everybody should be looking at, and this will increase your revenue more than 26%, but even if you just got 26% it will make your life more simple, and that is finding your perfectly profitable prospects. I just had a conversation yesterday where they were a fractional consultant and I said, "So who do you service?" They're like, "Well, we service anyone." I'm like, "That is a marketer's nightmare because when you become everything to everyone, you actually turn out to be nothing to no one." You don't create an identity. And so I find in the service-based businesses, especially with consultants and any home service-based business, but professional services as well, is that if you don't find out who your people are, you will never connect with anyone. When we just say everyone, our brain doesn't focus on anything. So when we find that perfectly profitable prospect, which a lot of times comes down to which ones create the least amount of headaches, are the most appreciative of the services that you provide and are more than willing to pay your premium rates. Just in those three things you can identify at least one perfectly profitable prospect. What that does is it allows us to talk directly to that prospect or that persona, if you will, and find out what are their pain points and all those things? And what motivates them? What are they afraid of? What are they most excited about? What are they looking for? What are they not looking for? All of these things, if you can get very specific on who you're talking to, you can identify these things really quickly. Which then translates over to where your conversion rate comes in, where we're talking about all the verbiage on your website that makes people take action. Well, if you don't connect with somebody, like when you say everybody, you can't connect with anybody, when you have all of that data and you start plugging that into your message, guess what? Your conversion rate goes up. And then once you understand who those people are, now you can focus your marketing at very specific pockets of people. Where do they hang out? What associations are they proud of? How do they consume their media? All of these things come crystal clear when you become crystal clear who you're trying to talk to. David McBee: Now that you've identified the person who is most likely to help you improve those three areas by 26%, what tactics do you use to get in front of them? Michael Buzinski: So identifying them, I mean so who they are. Let's just say you are a B2B service and you are a bookkeeper and you want to work with plumbers. And you're like, "Okay, now I understand why plumbers hate bookkeeping, why their books suck during tax season. I understand that they loath that whole process." So we know what their pain point is, so we can then craft that message, so identifying and then synthesizing to make sure that that message is there. Now you take this message and you put it where plumbers are, American Plumbing Association, local plumbers' unions. I mean, wherever those independent plumbers are, you're going to want to be in front of them. I have a client who works with builders, construction companies, residential construction, so they're part of a builders something association, a BIA in California. So all they do is network there, plus they sponsor because there's more people that are part of that BIA than there are actually go to the events. So they're sponsoring there, now they're bringing that traffic from a very targeted group of people that they want to talk to and putting them in front of a message that is crafted specifically for that group of people. David McBee: And that's actually something that Simpli.fi can help really with these small business owners. We can target business owners, we can target plumbers, we can target builders based on data that we've collected. And that's just probably another great avenue of getting in front of that right audience. Michael Buzinski: Exactly. I tell people all the time if you can get your marketing on point, your advertising can be really easy tactic. And people, they think that advertising and marketing are the same thing. And it's like no, media is an amplifier of a message. Marketing is the cultivation of that message. And if you haven't tested it organically, then you are now just throwing money out in the street and hoping that whatever you came up with is there. The people that I see, I've been doing marketing now for 30 years and I've worked with folks like you for the last 18, where we see the best results from things like what Simpli.fi TV does is that make sure that your ducks are in a row. Make sure that you know when people reach out to you from your advertising, one, you can track it. Two, you know that there's a predictable experience of those people getting into your funnels. And three, that your sales are ready to take those on. Working with a dental group right now, their people can't handle the amount of leads coming in and they're not really good at closing the leads for these high-end services. So the advertising was working, but they weren't ready for the advertising. So they had to take a step back and go, "Okay, let's get all that together and boom, boom, boom." So yes, being able to target like you guys target is immensely important, especially nowadays because advertising is so expensive. So being a sniper versus a spray and pray, is what we call it, is much more affordable and you get much higher ROI. David McBee: Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Well, I can tell from the short time that we've spent together that you are a plethora of knowledge and I want to give you a moment to let people know where they can get your book. Michael Buzinski: I'm actually giving my book away at ruleof26.com right now. Just go in there, you'll get a signed copy. All I ask is that you pay for the shipping and handling, which is like five bucks. And you get all of the details that we just talked about in there. I pack it into about 115 pages. David McBee: That's awesome. I'll be ordering a copy later today. Michael Buzinski: Awesome. Sounds great. David McBee: What is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Michael Buzinski: The best way is to follow me on LinkedIn, Michael Buzinski. I also have You Are Buzzworthy on Instagram or you can just check out our marketing firm at buzzworthy.biz. David McBee: Michael, thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. Michael Buzinski: Thanks for having me. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simpli.fi and follow us on LinkedIn to be notified of our latest episodes. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time.