Today's Guest

Howard Wolpoff is the Chief Marketing Strategist at Profit Master Business Solution. Howard is a Measurable Marketing Solutionist with over 25 years of experience helping hundreds of businesses create profitable solutions to drive sales, attract and maintain customers, and build a solid corporate brand. It’s important to note that you don’t need to carry the weight of figuring out your marketing strategy alone. Howard generously shares steps you can take to identify your ideal clients and the strategies to make them repeat customers. Tune in to learn the importance of meeting your customers where they are.

Resources Shared

• Howard Wolpoff
• Profit Master Business Solutions
• Howard Wolpoff, MBA | LinkedIn
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street. Do you remember that famous marketing line, "Half my advertising money is wasted. I just don't know which half," attributed to the legendary retail merchant, John Wanamaker? Well, today's guest is here to tell you which half is wasted. He is Howard Wolpoff, who calls himself a measurable marketing solutionist. Welcome to the show, Howard.

Howard Wolpoff:

Thank you, Gordon. I appreciate being here.

Gordon Henry:

Great to have you. So, just a quick background on Howard. As I mentioned, he's a measurable marketing solutionist. He has over 25 years experience helping hundreds of businesses create profitable solutions to drive sales, attract and maintain customers, and build a corporate brand. He's helped launch businesses such as Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment, the Brooklyn Cyclones Minor League Baseball team in GridironNow.com, the premier site for SEC football. A lot of sports. He previously served as the the director of BEST Media in Houston, and the vice president of client integration at Client Focused Media in Jacksonville, Florida, where he also produced four local TV shows.

He was a host on Buzz TV where he interviewed local business owners and leaders, and he's currently a host on Marketing Champions, a segment where he interviews owners and CEOs, marketing and advertising agencies around the country. What should listeners get out of this episode? If you're tired of feeling that your small business is stuck and your marketing efforts aren't getting a response, you may want to give Howard a call and we'll get into how you can do this. So Howard, again, welcome to the show. You were born and raised in New York City. I was wondering if maybe you could tell us a little bit about growing up in New York and how you got started in your career and ended up in Jacksonville?

Howard Wolpoff:

Sure. Yes, I used to say born and bred in the Bronx, and grew up there and moved to the Upper West Side, Manhattan when I got older, after college. I actually went to graduate school at Fordham University in New York. New York was a phenomenal experience growing up there, living there, starting my career there. I had great opportunities to create two businesses, primarily Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment. People are familiar on the West Side Highway of all the different sports venues there, and I ran the business side of the sports club after helping to set them up. And then it was in business school I got a start with the Brooklyn Cyclones in their infancy, bringing baseball back to Brooklyn, and really living out my sports fantasy working for a baseball team for five seasons.

Gordon Henry:

Awesome. So, why do small businesses find marketing such a challenge? You run a small business yourself, you could tell us a little about marketing your own business, but why is it they find it so hard?

Howard Wolpoff:

The problem is that most people did not go to college to be a business owner. They went to college to be an employee and now you have a thought, you have an idea, you have a concept that you want to launch out and run a business around, and you really weren't trained on all the different aspects. Part of the problem start beforehand, because there are things that need to get accomplished before you launch the business that get skipped along the way, and then now you have to operate this business and work on customers and customer service and you don't have this background in marketing that you need to launch the business and really connect with prospects, so it does make it hard to get the ball rolling.

Gordon Henry:

Right. Why don't we get into a little bit of what you think are the key areas where small businesses aren't doing well and what you would recommend they do different. What are a few common mistakes, and what are the fixes to those mistakes?

Howard Wolpoff:

Well, I think the biggest challenge is that small businesses think they have to do everything. And you look at some of the bigger companies, and I'll give Lowe's for example, they do everything. You see them digitally, you see them on TV and billboard. Small businesses don't have that type of budget, so sometimes they go running after ideas without really seeing and having a marketing plan to really focus on getting the attention of the people who they really need to get the attention of. And I guess connected with that is not fully understanding who their customer is and finding the places where their customers are.

So if you are spending time on every social media platform and your customers are not on Twitter, that's a waste of time, effort, and possibly money in the process. You want to find them where they are, and people want to be marketed to the way they want to be marketed to. That's something I've been saying well over 20 years. And the problem is, you need to figure out where that is and who that is, and once you do, then the path starts to get easier, the lights start to get a little bit brighter and you start seeing the flow of revenue that you're looking for.

Gordon Henry:

You said something interesting in there that was kind of embedded a little bit. I want to bring that out. You talked about your client profile or your ideal client. There's this idea of an ideal client profile and I wonder if many small businesses don't spend enough time figuring out who that is. If I'm a roofer, not everybody who has a roof is my potential customer. There are certain either maybe upscale or less affluent or certain shaker roofs at certain times. How do you figure out who's your ideal client, and then market?

Howard Wolpoff:

I laugh when you say that. The example I love to give is people who like to sell hand lotion. Their market is not everyone with hands, and you have to focus on... [inaudible] It's first of all, people who use lotions, and then people who use a certain type of lotion and seem to have the skin issues that your lotion might be addressing. Again, roofs too. Each roof is different, but you also are working on a geographic area and that starts with, this is where your roofing clients can be. And the hope is that with the release this past year of the Avatar sequel and the other ones to come, the word "avatar" will still stay in people's minds.

And really, that's where it is. You need to figure out the caricature of who your prospect is and keep talking to them and keep focusing your energies towards them, and it can broaden out during the course of time, and can broaden out during the feedback you get from people who have an interest in your product and business. You need to then be efficient in how you're spending your time, effort, and money in marketing to make sure that you're speaking to them and that they're responding.

Gordon Henry:

So if I'm a small business and I hear this and I'm thinking, yeah, I guess I do have a specific type of customer but I'm not really sure who that is, how would I go about doing it? Do I go into my database and start looking at these people and trying to find similarities? What's the method?

Howard Wolpoff:

I think that's part of it. If you have a database, again, there's a lot of small businesses that won't have that, so I think that's great. Let's start with that database and analyze who they are. And again, this is taking time. If you're doing it by yourself, that's also, here's a new marketing challenge that you've not been trained to do. Sometimes it's really important to find those marketing people to help you in this process. But doing that and doing surveys and having conversations with the people that come in, these are the first steps in really analyzing who your customer is. You also want to take a look broader in the industry. You may have competitors in your market, you may have competitors in different cities and states. Get an assessment of who they're targeting and being successful with, and there's a pretty good chance that that's the same person that you want coming into your business.

Gordon Henry:

Now we mentioned there databases, and it's a big passion of mine as well for small businesses because you have to know who your customers are and have a way of reaching out to them. How should a small business that doesn't have a database, or maybe they just have pieces of paper lying around, build a database? As basic as that is, how should I go about doing it?

Howard Wolpoff:

The key is really starting one, and I agree with that. If you have pieces of paper, you want to put it into a physical database, whether it's something as simple as Excel, just putting it down there, or purchasing a CRM, and even more so, purchasing autoresponder software so that you're taking this database and creating an email list out of it, because you would like to communicate with them on a regular basis. Depending on the product and the situation, you don't want it on a daily basis. You don't want to be overkill because people get too much email as it is, but it's important that you give them the option to opt in to an email list so they don't get annoyed with the process. But having this and be able to provide them with a coupon, a special every so often, a reason to draw them back into the store, find different ways to repeat customers.

Sometimes it's something that they can be repeat customers, like it's a dry cleaner's and they'll come in every 1, 2, 3 weeks or so, or it's something that's a one-off but there are creative ways to get them to come back or to use your services or product as a gift for someone else, and he's just trying to get these ideas in their head to do that. And if you don't have a list, it's very hard to do that and to drive those people in, but there's ways to do that on your website.

There's ways to do that if you have a storefront and bringing people in, filling and making a little contest in trade for their email address. Something on the website that is valuable information that they see is an absolute need for them to read and learn, if you're trading it for that email address which is really a great way to start, we dive into websites, having an offer on your site that is something that would be of great value to people is a great way to start conversation on your website by you getting that email address in trade.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, absolutely. This idea of a small business and the need for a database, and you said maybe they'll be concerned about people getting too many emails, I'm a consumer just like you are. I feel like I get bombarded with emails from big companies and big media organizations. I don't feel that way at all about small businesses. First of all, I don't get very many from small businesses. When I say small, local businesses, and I have a different feeling about local businesses because they're local. I have more of a warm spot for them, let's say, because they're my local dry cleaner, my local restaurant, my local doctor, as opposed to the big company. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that, like how does the small business communicate in a different way? Or, are they perceived differently from big businesses out there?

Howard Wolpoff:

I think they absolutely can be perceived in a different way. It's not just the same run-of-the-mill email. I think using that concept, like a tagline on the bottom of the email that they see on a regular basis, "Support your local business concept," whether it's those words or something that matches with the business itself, it's important because look, I probably get more emails than most because I'm very curious to see what people send and I put them into folders, I use them as reference pieces, but I'll get a lot of corporate emails from Target and Lowe's and what have you, but some of the smaller ones really do stand out, and you can be very creative in how you communicate with people if you put the right time and effort into it.

Gordon Henry:

One of my pet peeves, I have to say and I've mentioned this before on the show, is that I don't get a message from my small business when I need to. And so examples are, I don't track when I need to change my oil on my car. I don't track when the shingles of my roof need to be replaced. I don't necessarily track when my HVAC system needs a new filter. There's all this stuff around my house and if the person who was coming to the house or fixing my auto or what have you would track that for me and just remind me, it would be like the greatest thing.

Howard Wolpoff:

It's a great point because a lot of small business owners don't think that way and that's the problem. I had a client when I was working at the agency in Houston, they had something similar to that but in postcard form, and this goes back to 2015 or so. And it was a great postcard that they did little variations of. It was a cartoon, so there really was a pattern to it that they were doing, let's call it a continuing story, and people would get the postcard, they'd see it, and oh yeah, I need to get my systems serviced. It's time.

But the conversation was challenging for the owner to understand is, "Okay, let's go through this. Let's check off the ones that you do get, and then obviously that's part of your budgeting of what you're going to get for your service contracts." But what about the ones that don't respond? How do we speak to them? Maybe postcards isn't doing it for them. They just throw things down and throw things in the garbage. But an email and getting emails into them, it took a while for her to understand the value of that, but once we were able to implement that, lo and behold, they doubled their business pretty quickly because again, back to my statement, people want to be marketed to the way they want to be marketed to. This spoke to them and they got results.

Gordon Henry:

So let's talk a little bit about the Howard Wolpoff system. Somebody calls you, they say, "Hey, I think I'm having some problems with marketing," what are the steps you're going to take them through in terms of figuring out their budget, figuring out the problems and how to fix them? What does it look like to become a client?

Howard Wolpoff:

Well, first and foremost, when I sit with someone, we're going through a two-hour session, I state that, like, "Be prepared, it's going to be that long because I want to make sure that we're going everything." I call it the good, the bad and the ugly, because the reason why people are coming to me is because they have challenges and confusion in their business. Things are not moving, things are not working. They don't understand how to market the business, so I want to understand why. Let's figure out what got you to the point of making this call to contact me. I want to learn about what's worked and what doesn't work, and then now we're making a checklist because there's so many different aspects, you can't just tack them all in one place. We're going through, is there a problem that people aren't resonating with your website? And that's always going to be closer there at the top of the list because websites are very important and people are, at the very least, doing research on you.

In the process, they may pick up the phone and call, but they're going to look at your website to get a sense of what you do, but how it speaks to them. And more often than not, websites don't speak to anyone. They speak to just the person that designed it, "I did this. I did that. I'm the best roofer. I do great things," but it doesn't speak to their need because people are on a journey. There's a problem they have they don't want, and there's a result that they want that they don't have, and that's regardless of what their actual specific journey is. But if you fall into, I need a new roof, they'll look at local roofing websites, and if you speak to them within the website in different ways which is something that's part of this list as well, they will respond and hopefully click and hopefully provide an email address if you provide them with the information that they see valuable enough to learn from, and that starts the conversation and they come a prospect.

So once we figure out what your needs are... And some of it is more structural and operational, some of it is that you have an issue with managing your time and trying to create a calendar for yourself so everything is structured and things can start to move a little bit easier. Situations with how to balance being a boss and supervisor and trying to actually do the work that you enjoy doing, sometimes that's the challenge as you get bigger, you end up being the boss and supervisor. You're not going into homes or onto people's roofs or under people's sinks and having to grasp that too because you went into business for a reason. Sometimes it's because you wanted to get away from who you're working for, you can do it better and show the world and that you can do that. Sometimes it's more of a broader, this is my way to make a living so that my family can not only survive, but go on the vacations and do the savings and have those experiences. So, we're figuring out what your end game is and trying to reach it in the quickest way possible.

Gordon Henry:

Well, let's talk money for a second. First of all, what's the cost of working with you, and then also, what's the budget they should be thinking about for their marketing?

Howard Wolpoff:

Well, the budget for their marketing really varies based on what their revenue is. If you don't have the funds for marketing, it's very hard to market in certain ways, but there's also strategies to generate that. It's figuring out the things that you have not been doing to generate revenue that do not cost anything. So for example, are you doing upselling or down-selling or cross-selling in your sales process? Most companies are not doing that and once you implement that in, lo and behold, here are people not walking away with nothing. You actually can make a sale where you think that it's...

You see that there's an interest, but that's something that's either bothering them or there's more that they need that you're not offering them. So here you can generate additional revenues, and now you can incorporate that into your marketing budgets. Working with me, since I'm spending a lot of focus on my clients, the people who usually invest an entire year working with me, and that really is running the $60,000 for the year. We can break it out over the course of the monthly time, but it really is, how can you invest in your business to make it the business that you've wanted it to be and see yourself thrive?

Gordon Henry:

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the different types of marketing and this topic we introduced the show with of tracking and providing measurable results? Today, so much of what you market it on is digital, and digital should be trackable, but even offline is trackable because you can place a special phone number in an ad and you can see how many calls came into that phone number. So is it now, would you say, a time where you could pretty much figure out exactly which type of advertising is more or less effective in terms of return on your ad spend?

Howard Wolpoff:

It's easier than the days of John Wanamaker. With the different types of tracking, yes, having that 800 number that tracks everything and records them. There's great systems out there, text marketing, and you're seeing who is texting back and you can check it off the charts. Even digital marketing where there's a path from each ad, since someone clicks on it, you have a sense of who's clicked on it in the process. So measuring your return on investment and what's working, what's not working, is a lot easier than it was 50, 70 years ago, even 20 years ago. But really, it starts with having a strategy, and I talk about SMART methodology all the time because you can't just throw up ideas to the wall and seeing what sticks. Having something specific and measurable, actionable, realistic and timed are very important because you want to be realistic and set some goals.

So if you're trying to build your presence on social media, it's not going to happen in one day. If you set a goal as I want to get 10% more followers in 30 days, now you have a goal to check back to see what you've done, and see what worked or what didn't work to do that. If you're being realistic, so I want to get the most exposure that I want for my business, and the best way to do that is putting an ad on the Super Bowl, because look at the millions of people that watch the game on the Super Bowl. Well, those are the most expensive commercials in the entire calendar year, so your small business can't spend $6 million on an ad. There are dotcoms that did do that without having the dollars and that didn't work out so well. But it's really having a realistic approach to how you're marketing and then looking at the testing and seeing what's working and what's not working, and have you hit those goals on a monthly basis? If not, what are we doing next to do that better?

Gordon Henry:

I know a lot of businesses think, oh, well, I should be on Google, right? Everybody goes to Google to look for whatever it is they're in need of. But buying a click on Google can be super expensive because the competition for those keywords can be really high. I mean, if you try to be number one for pizza New York City, or plumber New York City, or maybe even plumber Jacksonville, you're going to spend a lot for those clicks. And so even though you think, well, that's where the people are, the return on that ad spend is going to be not so great. So it's not as obvious as, let me go where the people are. It's also, where can I buy efficient? Just like you don't want to buy a stock at the top of the market.

Howard Wolpoff:

I think the most expensive one is personal injury attorneys. Oh, it's insane what those cost to get those ads. But you can be strategic in doing that if you're in the right industry, in the right place. There are places where people may not know you, but you actually may be the only person in town, but you have to figure out how to do that. It could be very efficient to buy ads in that way. Also, people are still going to Bing, and no one ever talks about Bing advertising. Everyone talks about Google. Being number one on Bing, for those that have that embedded into their computers when they purchase it and have Microsoft software and are doing searches there, can be really successful for you as there's a lot of different services, and you really have to find the right ones that aren't in it for them as opposed to in it for you, where voice-activated search is also working very well for certain businesses. So, there's a lot of research you need to do to make sure you're making the right investments.

Gordon Henry:

We're going to go to a quick break. We'll be back with marketing expert Howard Wolpoff right after the break. Don't go anywhere.

Speaker 2:

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Gordon Henry:

And we're back with Howard Wolpoff, a marketing expert who's telling us all about how you can make your marketing more effective and efficient. One of the things you mentioned briefly is a CRM system, and we here, our show is sponsored by Thryv, and Thryv makes a CRM for small business. And it's not only about building a database, it's what you can use that database for. I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit since you raised it before, how can you use your database or your CRM system to find more customers and keep them coming back?

Howard Wolpoff:

I think finding that right CRM for you is very important. I have one that also builds funnel websites and you can start the whole process of someone coming into the funnel, accepting the clicking to download the offer that you have for them, now their email's in the system, and you send their emails into different email lists that you have that will have a different email every few days to learn more about what you're offering, and then that could send them into a different direction. It's amazing what these systems can do, but also, it starts with having a plan. What are you going to do when you have their email address? Look, talking about why it's important for have a good roof on your house, there are a lot of different things that can be of value emailed on a regular basis. I live in Florida. Unfortunately, there are insurance companies that are leaving Florida because of the political atmosphere and the weather issues that we get here at times.

And there's a lot to learn about, whether my roof right now, we were discussing it randomly, I think we're on year 12, year 13, year 20 is pretty much your max. At some point, you'll get pressure from insurance companies at year 15. So, getting this type of information so it's on your mind, so that you're putting money away or planning out to do that. It could be a great value to these roofing companies because they don't want to wait every 20 years for your business. They want to figure out ways to incorporate other things. That's why a lot of companies, and I'm seeing it here, a HVAC company will then buy an electrician, who will then buy a plumbing company, and now it is all three in one so they're not just waiting for the two times of service for the year. Or when your service system has to get replaced every seven to 10 years, here's other services they can provide, and by sending emails and having this type of communication with a database of people can really keep driving revenue in for these types of companies.

Gordon Henry:

You've been doing this for quite some time, Howard. I love to hear success stories from small businesses who benefited from the type of advice or strategies you can develop. Can you tell us maybe one or two that stick out in your mind as a company that you worked with where the results afterwards were really good, really compelling?

Howard Wolpoff:

There's a few things that jump in mind that I've enjoyed from my career. One that I'm enjoying now, it's not on that framework, but just how you can brand yourself and that can really help keep the business building, is I have a client who actually was a matchmaker. We worked together for a while and I really helped broaden her business and her own brands, and now a year-plus later, she's now featured in a Netflix series about matchmaking in a different country. It's very rewarding to see the successes that she's seen from the growth that we created together, but my favorite is, I used to work at the local sports radio station here in Jacksonville, Florida, and I was the director of sales and marketing there as well.

We had a client who had like four or five different offices for weight loss, and it was a place that was known for... More women than men would come in, and granted a sports radio station is a male-dominated listening audience, and we had someone who was a spokesperson, which is always a great way to do advertising on the radio. However, his name was huge in the market. He'd been host of different shows in different stations. Everyone knew who he was. They also knew him as a heavy older gentleman, I'll call it. And so, he might've lost some weight on the plan at one point, but that's not what you picture. You see him around town, he's chewing on a cigar and he's not the model that they needed, so gently, because I had to deal with a very large personality.

We talked about having him come off and we made it more real for people. We did individuals within the station who were not the talents, but workers. Actually, I did it myself and someone else to start, and the goal was to get a response and then start using listeners as part of the campaign. So for me, I lost 50 pounds, it was fantastic on the weight loss side, but my messaging worked and in the end where there were 80% women the year before, they ended up being 56% male one year later with a 40% increase in revenue across the board. It was amazing listening to these men come in and see their reactions when they did the commercial, but then having them hear it on the air and knowing that it helped other men, and lots of people lost weight over the course of that campaign.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific. We just have a few minutes left and I want to make sure people have a way to get in touch with you and know what they might find out or how it might go if they contact you. I know in your marketing materials, it says that you're willing to do a prospecting call or like a free call for 30 minutes. Can you tell us, if somebody contacts you for that initial call, how's that call going to go? What should they expect to get out of that?

Howard Wolpoff:

I think first and foremost, I'm going to listen. I'm going to learn about what's going right and wrong and somewhere in-between for your company, and really get a sense of what your goals are. There are certain different things that if I believe I can suggest, I'm more than happy to do that in the process of... A little larger than a Band-Aid, but not really sending anyone off for the answers to everything because I think working with someone on a regular basis is important. I think that having a coach is extremely important for businesses that are extremely successful and those that are really challenged. I think as you do research, you'll find that the very successful CEOs have a coach and that's one of the reasons why they continue to be successful and continue to grow. And there's value of getting that second opinion that you can call on a regular basis. I may meet with people once a week, but my email and my texts are available 24/7 if a situation comes up so that we can talk about it and see how best to address it.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific. So Howard, you've been doing this a long time. What do you see as next in your career? Where are you going in the next six to 12 months where you can build your brand or expand what you're doing? What are some of the steps you're taking?

Howard Wolpoff:

Well, I do hosting as well. I've hosted a couple of different podcasts. I actually put up today my 100th episode of a podcast, Small Business Marketing, then an hour where I speak to small business owners about their marketing journey. I'm probably winding that down and starting a new one. I have a book that's going to be coming out which really goes over... It's like the textbook that you didn't have in the class, you did not have in college, of how to be a business owner. So that's going to be the book, and there's going to be a podcast connected with it where I'm talking to marketing experts and filling in some of those details, because the book goes all the way up to opening day and then there's the marketing of the business. It's really the checklist you need to get a business started, so hopefully seeing that out within the next month and the podcast starting soon after.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific. So, final question, how should people find you or find out about you? Where should they go?

Howard Wolpoff:

The best way to find me is my website, profitmasterbusinesssolutions.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn and speak to me there, Howard Wolpoff, W-O-L, P as in Peter, O, F as in Frank, F as in Frank.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, terrific. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show, really valuable insights, and hopefully we'll have a few people reach out to you as a result of hearing you on the podcast.

Howard Wolpoff:

Well, Gordon, I appreciate that. I love conversations like this, and I really thank you for having me.

Gordon Henry:

And I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman, and our coordinators, Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe, and please leave us a five-star review. We'd really appreciate it, it helps us in the rankings. Remember, small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo at thryv.com/pod and check out our new free product Command Center at thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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