The Power of Targeted Marketing and AI in Business Growth

hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of E Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser, and on today’s show, I have with me the pleasure of speaking with Joshua Maddux, the founder, and CEO of 95 Visual, a premier web application development firm located just outside Los Angeles, California. With an in-depth background in website planning, strategy, development, and architecture.

Joshua has established himself as a leader in the industry, helping his clients establish and maintain a better web presence through information architecture, project management, and web strategy. He has a proven track record of helping businesses 3X, their customer interactions, and their leads online.

He is also an active member of the business community serving on the Santa Clarita Valley Business Group Board and the UCSB PaCE CX Advisory Board. We’ll find out about that, is a member of the Santa Clarita Chamber of Commerce and Valley Industry Association. Joshua, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

Awesome. Good to be on.

Fantastic. Joshua, how would your university professors describe you as a student?

It depends on which class. In school, I definitely enjoyed certain classes over others. As all of us probably have had that experience.

I would say in my classes such as marketing or ethics or business law was getting stuff done on time and turned in and, doing that the classes that. Such as biology you had to take in college just because everybody had to. It’s I’m not going into the medical field.

I don’t see any reason to be in this class. And we’ll get it done, might not be the best 150% effort.

It’s kinda hard to focus on something you’re not interested in, at least in my opinion.

Or that’s not as applicable.

Absolutely. Due to your field of study or your field of interest. Have you always been entrepreneurial? Like for instance, growing up, did you have a paper route and, all those things and part-time job and hu and hustling too, do the grind to make money?

So yes and no. I’ve been an entrepreneur for a lot of my life.

My brother, ages ago he started making duct pallets when that was like first a trend and it was like, we could sell these online. Like how do you, register a domain name? There’s this website that you have to go to and like, how do you make a website?

And this was ages ago. And it was like how do we take payments online? It was like trying to figure all that mess out and Now it’s very different. You can spin up a Shopify accountant or just use Etsy or one of those platforms. And there are tons out there.

But it’s, projects like that or running my business or other concepts and I Have a handful of friends that are all business owners, we’re always talking about some idea or some concept or something that we’re working on or, so it’s, continuing to bounce those off other people and come up with new ideas on a weekly basis.

What inspired you to start 95 Visual?

So this is an interesting story. It’s twofold. One is I was actually in college pursuing a degree in a totally different direction and as I was in college, I there was a local web company who was not completing projects on time or was not completing them period.

And I came in and helped a few companies basically complete those projects. And what I didn’t know at the time was one of those business owners was in a networking group. And that business owner, the networking group that he was in, had multiple other businesses that also had the same problem caused by the same web developer.

And I’m not saying that all web developers do this. I’m it’s typically the minority that causes the bad rap for the rest of us. And so little did I know that my helping a friend solve a problem on their website would All of a sudden create a list of clients.

Within and, at that time it was more or less almost all like webmaster stuff. It was we’re talking 15, 17 years ago where sites didn’t have a great front end like they do today. You couldn’t rearrange objects on a page easily. You basically had an FTPN and change out code and tables and CSS, and so it was that type of stuff. And so it was swapping out content, images, just the basic webmaster stuff oftentimes. And fast forward a few months I was going to class during the day and on weekends and evenings. I was working on project stuff for clients and it quickly started to grow.

Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, you’ve completed your degree.

Yes, I did.

I know some people have done that they just said to hell with it, I’m just gonna focus on the business to hell with finishing the degree, but, hey, good for you for finishing something.

You started. So what approach did you take then to solving like these other people were failing businesses, entrepreneurs, whatever, were failing at the web development process? What approach did you take then, and how has it evolved?

So there’s definitely two aspects to that. So the first is, I saw that a lot of the companies that come into the market and end up failing, fail for typically one of two reasons. One, they see web design or marketing as a get wit rich, quick-type element. They come in and they go, I need to make a hundred thousand dollars in the next 90 days. If that’s your goal, don’t start a marketing company.

If your goal is to build business relationships and help those businesses grow, that’s a great goal. And if you help 5, 10, 50, or a hundred businesses grow and they’ll grow exponentially. Your business will grow and you’ll make money. But with that, I oftentimes see a lot of companies where they come in and their goal is just to get as many clients as fast as possible to pay as much as possible, and they don’t care what casualties are left in the wake. And the problem is oftentimes it’s the clients that they have destroyed their businesses and they’re not referring, and that’s just a terrible way to start that. So that’s one of the big issues I see. And then the other issue is oftentimes people come into the industry and they say, I’m gonna price at the lowest end of the market so I can get the most amount of clients. And the problem is they’re doing work that they should be billing a thousand dollars for, and they’re billing $200 and it’s not sustainable.

And then as they scale that up they’re losing 10, 20%. And as they start to scale, they start hiring. And then they realize that they have a team of four people that are working for them and money, and they’re all losing money. And if you’re losing a thousand dollars a month, having one employee and it’s not profitable. It’s not going to be profitable. Hiring five more employees doesn’t fix the problem. It just makes the problem worse. And so, it’s the aspect of twofold. One, charging an adequate price that we know we can get the job done for not necessarily being the cheapest in the market, but also doing what we say we’re going to do and following through on it.

And sadly, one of the things that I saw in the market was half the, not necessarily half, but a good chunk of the web companies that were failing because they couldn’t deliver on time and under budget. Basically, follow through on the promise you made.

It can deliver on time and, on budget. It’s interesting as a web developer and I’ve developed websites and designed websites. It’s hard because we have to begin with the end in mind and guesstimate, based on the scope of work that the client tells us how long it’s going to take.

And we have to guesstimate what the cost per action is gonna be. And then figure out how much it’s gonna cost and what kind of margin we’re gonna make. And we have to price that proposal competitively in order to get the job. It’s almost like a car. Someone goes to a car dealership and orders a custom car and the salesperson guesstimating what it’s gonna take to build that car, what it’s gonna take, and coming up with a price.

And then after the fact, the customer decides they want extra things that they did not include in the original request for the car. And I find that is the case with web development and web design and it’s a very difficult thing to continue to do, I can’t remember his name, but he wrote the book Profit First.

And this is a common problem in the industry where people don’t know how to price themselves. Competitively and provide value and also make a profit. And so I’m just trying to figure out, I know a guy who I interviewed, and he publicly said this he grew his agency to 330 clients and he grew himself broke.

He was not making any money. He was paying himself very little and he disclosed this on a previous episode and it’s how do you do that?

In that regard, how did you solve that problem?

I actually had an agency locally that approached me and said, Hey, we’d love to we’re the owner of the business was looking to step out and he’s Hey, I’m moving. I’d love to sell you my agency. And I was like, that’s great. You have a client list of a hundred people that are the lower-end clients who all pay 399 for hosting and have crappy broken websites. I was like, why would I pay you money for that list?

Why would that like they’re all on your portfolio page on your website? I was like, I’ll just wait till someone buys your company and then I’ll just go down the list and contact each one of ’em. Like, why?

Going back to your question I think one of the biggest things where and I’ve said this before on a podcast and in some other articles and stuff, and it’s not an oftentimes well-received comment by some people in the industry is the companies that are out there that are niching down are in reality what I refer to as executive agencies. They have one strategy that they have developed and all they’re doing is running around and they’re executing that strategy. The problem is, The strategy for an accountant to acquire new customers is gonna work for other accountants.

Sometimes it might not work for accountants that specialize in a specific field or a niche or, only work with high net worth individuals or only work with whatever. And so the problem is, There’s a strategy that’s already been developed and it’s not being custom tailored to each business. And so oftentimes that marketing agency is running around and executing, and the reality is they’re not executing a strategy.

They’re executing the businesses that they’re bringing on as clients, and without customizing a strategy. Your strategy’s not gonna work. You can take it, we have two clients that are in the exact same industry that do almost the exact same thing, but their ideal client is night and day different.

And so in reality, The same strategy for marketing does not work for both clients. The same strategy for content doesn’t work for both clients. And so that’s where, for us, we lead with a strategy-first approach. We wanna make sure that the client and, the hard part is oftentimes when a client comes to us, they’re like, we’ve been in business 9 years, 10 years, 20 years whatever that is. And we’re on our fourth, fifth, and sixth websites, and none of our other sites have really done much. They haven’t really produced much in the way of leads. And I’m like, great, here are 50 questions we want to know about your business and I’ve literally had a company who’s not a client, but we sat down and had a conversation and they build custom pools.

They’re not typical custom pools. So custom swimming pools, but they’re the ones that have the waterfall and the swim bar I sat down and I asked the owner, and I said, Hey, who is your ideal client? And he said, anyone within about 20 miles of my business.

It was like, so the guy who’s renting an apartment, the person who’s month to month on their mortgage like those are not your ideal client. Your pool is gonna be Six figures like you’re talking $200,000 for a custom pool, what this company builds. I was like, that’s not someone who’s month to month.

That’s not someone who lives in a small house. That’s someone who has a half acre plus of property and makes typically has a college degree and makes high six figures significant, if not seven figures a year. And the guy was just like, just taken back by this and I’m like, okay, how long have you been in business?

And he’s 25 years. I was like if you would’ve figured this out 25 years ago that you’re not directing your marketing correctly. I’m like, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Because you’d be in The Bahamas.

Making so much money from selling your company.

Exactly. Or running it and he just comes back twice a month and or once a month and just checks in, whatever.

In reality, so many businesses are selling quarter million dollar swimming pools to the guy who’s renting an apartment.

Is that one of the biggest mistakes people making in the last 1500%?

100%. We had a client locally brick and mortar that you have to physically be on the property.

It’s not a store, but a physical Like in-person experience type of thing. Anyway and so we when we onboarded with the client, they were spending I think it was like three to $4,000 a month in Google AdWords. And they’d been spending that amount of money for somewhere in the realm of four or five years. And no one had set geolocation on x

So they had spent somewhere in the realm of 80 or $90,000 in ad waste because they didn’t hire an agency to come in and just they were running it themselves. I was like They were running up themselves.

And what happened was see so they were, it was set up. They had reached out to a Google rep or something. And the Google rep helped them set it up. And no one ever looked at it. And so we charged them to do an account audit.

So we built this client a website and did all this other stuff for them. And then I said, okay, what other marketing are you doing? And we’re gonna basically audit all of your marketing because we’re looking at your strategy. And we wanna figure out where things are at. And they’re like, oh no, Our ads are fine. I was like no, you don’t this is part of our thing. We’re gonna look, we’re gonna take a peek at all the accounts. If it’s good, then we’ll just say, that’s fine, leave it. We won’t touch it, we’ll step back. But if we see a problem, we’re gonna come in and help assess that and fix the issue.

And we took their ad budget from the $3,000 a month or whatever it was. I think we dumped it down to 250 bucks and then it might be a little bit more, it might have been around $500. And then we set a geolocation and then we took the other $2,500 that they weren’t spending there. And we put a thousand do or 1500 bucks into SEO.

We put another 500 bucks into some Facebook ads. And so with the inside of that $3,000 a month, we just reallocated the funds. To get better outcomes massively, their SEO ranking organically now is ridiculous. The Google Ads, we only run for testing and it’s crazy to see that so many business owners, and sadly, oftentimes business owners are cautious about letting an agency take a peak because the agency says, oh, I can get you better results.

Just double the amount you’re spending. Like just double what you’re spending.

Especially if you get paid a percentage of ad spend.

Exactly. And if that person is that business owner, that’s what they’ve been used to is just agencies coming in and just trying to crank the dial up on the spend.

That’s one of the challenges that we’re up against on a daily basis, having that conversation with business owners. And, but it’s, crazy. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen this type of stuff. I’m like, what would a business owner have done with a hundred thousand dollars more?

And sometimes it’s not a $ 2,500-a-month waste. Sometimes it’s, we had a client recently that they’re, we onboarded them as a client and they’re like, I keep getting this bill from GoDaddy. I was like, what’s the invoice for it? And they’re like, I don’t know, I just pay it every month.

And I’m like, okay, great. We hop in the GoDaddy account, take a look. And when was the last time you guys hosted anything with GoDaddy? And they’re like, I don’t know, it’s been probably three or four years. And I’m like, great. You’ve been spending 150, 250 bucks a month for a dedicated server over at GoDaddy that’s just been running for the past three years that have nothing on it.

So how do you, what’s your approach then to helping customers develop that, persona cause that’s what they need to do is find out who their persona is.

So we have a process that we’ve developed over the years that basically we work through a few things with the client.

One, if a client comes to us and says, I have no idea who our ideal client is, we sit down and work with them to develop that. We have an ideal client workbook that we go through and we develop that with the client. And then from there, we’re gonna write Content based on who that ideal client is.

So many people will have a website rebuilt and they spend all this money on a brand-new website. And then the first thing they do when the developer asks for content is they go, just grab whatever’s on our old website. And it’s got it. So all we’re doing is we’re taking the same broken and dead and not SEO content and we’re just repainting it. That’s all you’re doing if you’re not revising and refreshing that copy and if that content was written 2, 3, 4, 5 plus years ago. How cool do things online change? How people’s interactions with websites has changed? We’ve got clients who during COVID.

I’m looking through their website and I’m like, Hey you guys closed your office nine months ago, but it still has that as a location on your contact page. Maybe we should update this. And people oftentimes don’t think about that stuff. And so we go through and revise their content or rewrite their content entirely based upon how people read online now and how that ideal client is gonna read and how they’re gonna perceive the business and going through archetypes and making sure that the content is in alignment with what the business archetype is and there’s just a lot of stuff there from a strategy perspective that business owners don’t think about, but it can make the difference in your website ranking well on Google or not ranking well, your website converting or not converting.

And there’s just so much to go into that. And that’s a big part of, our process.

It’s interesting how important it’s, for instance, I was talking to one individual who said Red Bull no longer views itself as a soft drink company. They view themselves as a media company.

And they’ve chosen a specific demographic in extreme sports that is underserved and they’ve created multiple personas. In fact, I was talking to the guy who wrote the book YouTube and video marketing an hour a day, and he was telling me this. He goes, you need to know who your target market is.

It’s so important. And they create content. They don’t create content about how great their drink is or the features and benefits of their drink. They create content that people wanna watch based on sports, extreme sports, and little tidbits, and they’ve exponentially grown their sales as a result. And it’s amazing how many businesses I worked for a very large manufacturer in the automotive industry and a car dealership.

And I asked for the data that you’re, I asked the head office for what you’re talking about, the personas, what are, who are our personas that buy this vehicle. But they couldn’t gimme any of that information. They had none of it. Yeah. And they are a very large manufacturer who I won’t name because I don’t wanna get sued.

And so I dug into the CRM and started looking at the data in the CRM and, You try to figure things out that way. And I had a little bit, I had some success doing that. However, I wish that AI had been around then as it is now because I could have written those customer personas very well.

You passed a lot of that information off to AI nowadays. And that’s where I think, I briefly talked about some agencies niching down and there’s nothing wrong with niching down if you are customizing the strategy experience customize the strategy, customize the experience.

And so I think what happens with especially car dealerships is they just go so broad. They’re looking at, they’re like, sell, anybody wants to sell this. They’re like, anybody and everybody who wants to buy a car.

And that’s where you look at some brands. I there was this video I was watching the other day and they were talking about Rolls-Royce, I think it was. And how to roll they don’t advertise in traditional markets. They advertise at air shows, and they advertise in private jet magazines.

They advertise because that’s, they know that if you have money to be flipping through and looking at a private jet, then dropping money on a Rolls-Royce is nothing. And that’s, the people that they wanna attract.

It’s so important to find out who your customer is. And then target them where they’re at. I learned all this from Dan Kennedy reading a lot of his books. The Ultimate Marketing Plan, the Ultimate Sales Letter, and so on and so forth. He talked about the three M’S of marketing your market, your message, and your medium. And so many people want to just jump into the medium. Just well and flat, it just sprays and prays ads everywhere.

It is into not only jumping into that medium but also jumping into all of the mediums. And that’s what we see it all the time clients will ask us, they’re like, there’s all these social media platforms.

Should I just create accounts on all of them? And I’m like creating an account on all of them just to grab your handle is not a bad idea. Set up the profile, link it to your website, and do that, but maybe don’t be active on all of them because where is your target audience?

If your target audience is all hanging out on Instagram, but all you’re doing is blasting stuff on Twitter or Pinterest and you’re just screaming into a void. And making sure that your audience is on the platform that you’re on. And we saw this a lot during the beginning of COVID with things like TikTok and you look at some of the people that just blew up on some of these platforms at the beginning of COVID because they had an interesting message, whether it was the stupid video that they were doing or I look at, there’s a financial advisor that I follow on Instagram now, and she started posting at the beginning of COVID and ended up just quitting her job because she was getting so much traction. On Instagram and TikTok and all these platforms, she was like, I can literally create a following that will be massive through just sharing information.

And I see a lot of these platforms that business owners can leverage, but the like you mentioned, the sort of spray and pray type element. We all see those when we go on Facebook and it’s the guy who all posts the same thing. It’s just a photo of his business card and he does it every day.

No one’s hiring you off of that. People are cause, but it’s just, that’s not the great way to do it. Create some content that’s gonna be helpful and memorable and that’s where the money lives.

For entrepreneurs and startups who are just starting out. They can’t afford full-fledged custom web design and development in a marketing strategy. Cause that costs money. I’m thinking about the startup home inspector, the startup plumber, or the startup. Why, I don’t know, fix something, but what advice would you give them to be able to get things off the ground?

Are there any resources that you’ve leveraged in your career that you would tell them to read?

I think there are a few elements. One is just knowing who your ideal client is. And a lot of our worksheets and our packets that I’ve mentioned that my company’s developed over the years, we actually publicly have those available on our website.

And anyone can go grab ’em and download ’em and use them. We’ve had locally, there’s another agency that I know that oftentimes will have prospective clients that come in with our packet all filled out and walk into their office which is fine. If it’s helping a business that’s, awesome.

Understanding who that ideal client is, understanding where they live digitally from what platforms are they on perspective. And if you don’t know, then great. Go ask two or three of ’em. If you’re a home inspector, great, go ask. In reality, home inspector, your ideal client isn’t the home buyer.

Your ideal client is the real estate agent because that real estate agent is gonna send you leads for the next 10 years.

So don’t even target home buyers. There are target real estate agents.

There’s a company. There’s a guy locally who he and I were talking and, he’s I wanna do this and this in marketing, and this is what I wanna spend.

And I was like, okay, that’s great, but I don’t think you’re gonna actually be able to get ahold of your ideal client through the platforms that you wanna market on. And I said, in all honesty, I think a better spend is to go to Google, go to Yelp, and make a list of your top 50 people that you want to connect with.

And this week, call the first one and say, Hey listen, are you free for lunch on Friday? I’d like to take you to lunch. I wanna buy you lunch and just get to know you. And I was like, in reality, What’s lunch gonna cost you for you and one person? 50 bucks, maybe 60 bucks the most maybe.

And if you do that on a weekly basis, what are we looking at? 250 bucks maybe for the whole month? And so in reality, trying to reach those four people from ads online. You’re probably gonna spend a lot more than that because it’s a small niche and Buy ’em lunch, so if you’re a home inspector and you’re trying to connect with some real estate agents, buy ’em lunch, take ’em to lunch get creative. We had a, there was a company that reached out to us, a guy up in the Bay Area that reached out and he had. He was maybe three months in on an auto detailing company.

And he’s this is what I want to do and I need a website and I need marketing, and I need this and I need that. And I was like, okay, hold up. What is your marketing budget? And he’s I could probably swing two to 300 bucks this year. And I was like, then this phone call, you’re getting nowhere, dude.

And I was like, here’s the deal. Find two high schools that connect with their ASP and say you want to do a fundraiser and you wanna help them run a car wash and do a fundraiser, and you’re gonna split the proceeds with them for it. And do that bring in every family member or friend that you have that can help wash cars, buy t-shirts, stick ’em in your company t-shirts, do that, talk to the local newspaper, and see if they’ll do an article on it and see what happens? And I said, call me back in six months and let me know. Let me know how it’s going.

And it was like four months later, I get an email from this guy and he goes, I now have two trucks and I have four employees and we’re scaling the business.

And he goes, every month they pick a different school and they partner with the ASP department and they do a big giant fundraiser. And he goes, and we’ll raise five, six, $7,000 for the school. And he goes, and then we get booked for the next three, four weeks. And he is and we’re booked seven days a week for a month.

Josh, that is golden, that is such an amazing idea. And only a marketer could come up with an idea like that, so I, took my hat too. That’s such Did he becomes a client or he’s still working towards that?

No, He is working towards, and honestly, if that’s his strategy. Does he need a website? No, not necessarily. Spin up an Instagram account. Maybe buy the domain name of your business and re-point it to the Instagram account. And honestly, would a website help the credibility?

Maybe he could do an online payment, but in reality, he has Pam via Venmo or whatever. Yeah. So does it. Exponentially help that business? I don’t think it would at this moment. Now, if he’s got 20 trucks and he’s franchising to other cities and he’s growing beyond that, then okay. Maybe, but there’s a spot where I don’t think a business needs to spend thousands of dollars a year marketing and a website and stuff. And I think the biggest thing, and this is the pattern that all of these sorts of examples have had is find an existing community, find an existing group, and rally around that existing group, that existing community, help that community, or help that group in a way.

And then they will turn around and help you.

There’s a philosophy called givers gain. There’s a book I read, a business book about, bus giving like the Go-Giver or something like that Go-Givers. That’s what it’s called Go-Givers and when you give first it will come back to you. It’s this phenomenal book. And it’s so true. Everything you’re saying it’s with we touched on it just a little bit, but with the, what’s the word I’m looking for?

With the reality of AI, exponential growth is the result of AI coming onto the scene. And I personally believe that platforms are gonna be around where. You put in information like the last, the Squarespace, and all that is only gonna get better in the sense that if you host with oo, you answer some questions and it spits out a website for you.

What do you think the future of web development is with that in mind? And how are you planning? Staying ahead of the curve and pivoting, at all.

I think there’s some definite benefit to AI and I think there’s also some challenges. And some stuff that we still need to be cautious about.

Right now there’s some of the AI companies are getting sued for infringement of copyright because some of the work that they were trained on was copyright work and it’s using pieces of those now in reproduction, so there’s some of those issues. And just how do you create new and original work and, some of that? So that’s definitely a problem.

Now the second part of that is there are some things that AI is great at. There are some things that AI is absolutely terrible at. There are some things that AI is learning and is getting better at. And so an example of something great as I heard recently there are some attorneys now that are using AI to go through discovery docs and so they can have 10,000 pages of discovery documentation that get scanned in and OCR. And then they can tell the AI to go through all the discoveries. Say Find correlations between Mr. Smith and they can find any we found this parking ticket that this guy got and this guy had lunch in the same city and they’re two blocks from each other.

And find any correlation between any of these items. And AI can do that and it’s great at that stuff. Now I will say we’ve played with AI a little bit as well, and we’ve done a bunch of tests and there’s some, write a paragraph about this. And it’s dang, that’s good content. And then we’ll say, write a paragraph about this.

And we’re like, that sounds like gibberish. And so I hear you. It’s. What, we’ve used AI for recently is it’s a great tool for brainstorming. It’s a great tool for getting out of writer’s block. And so if you’re like, man, I need to write something on this topic, and you just sit there and stare at a blank Google Doc, you’re never gonna get that done.

But you hop over to some AI. Tools and you say, Hey, what are 25 different things that I could write about on this topic? And it goes, here are 25 different ones. And then you skim through those ideas and you start to generate your own. Based on some of the ideas and concepts that you’re reading.

And then you go from there. And so there’s a lot of stuff there.

He’s gotten ideas from AI that have started him off, but never been the final idea. It’s on the first iteration. Five years from now it’s, I can only, it’s unbelievable.

I literally got an email right before I hopped on here from Open AI about a demo that they’re doing for GPT4 today.

I’m a plus member, so I’ve already got access to it. I’ve already been playing with it. It’s pretty amazing. Anyway, it’s been fascinating to talk to you.

Thank you so much for coming to the show. How, can our audience connect with you online?

So I’m Joshua Maddox on LinkedIn. Or if you just search 95 Visual And then I alluded to a bunch of our different docs and, stuff ideal client doc and other ones. If you go to 95 visual.com/plan, I think it is or under the resource tab there’s a tab there, there’s a bunch of different guides and resources, and we’re.

Constantly adding to and improving that section. We’re actually in the middle of a full website refresh and, that section’s gonna be beefed up substantially. So we’re constantly doing that. Anytime we produce guides and resources for our clients, we end up publishing ’em as well.

Hey, thanks so much. We’ll make sure to put that information in the show notes. And again, thanks so much for being here. It’s a pleasure having me on the show.

Good to be on. Thanks.