Hello and welcome to another episode of the Winning with
Shopify podcast. Anyone's not seen before.
My name's Nick and hosting the show for a few years now and I'm
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form. We'll get you into the Growth
Hub as fast as we can. Now, today I caught up with
Michaela from True Cable, and I've got a whole load of notes
on this pad right here about the things we spoke about.
Again, these lists are really gaining traction now.
And I've had more emails about the funny things in the list
saying, Nick, can you tell us the full story?
Because you only did something that sounded a little bit more
political correct in the actual recording.
But yeah, if you know the full story about any of these things,
let me know. And we spoke about reviews, team
personalities, how to snatch customers, interesting way of
putting in it, but it was quite funny.
And Michaela made some really good points about it and
creating a product quiz so people can find the product that
is perfect for them. And how to find out what level
of customer knowledge customers have to then decide what kind of
content to create. AI versus a human touch when it
comes to content. Some very interesting points she
shared with us on that, how to create a content machine and
process where the entire team are now writing content, the
whole of your business creating content, especially the
technical people. We spoke about how they use SEO
and e-mail as their main 2 channels to drive everything,
which obviously, you know, you don't have to pay for any
traffic from SEO and e-mail just costs the same price as an
e-mail subscription. So super lean marketing and she
shares how they achieve that. We spoke about click through
rates on e-mail, AB tests they're running, saying no in
your sales pitch, in your marketing and in your content,
customer justification for why they're buying their products,
especially if it's a business product justifying it to their
boss. We spoke about the data and KPIs
and metrics that they monitor on a regular basis and also how
marketing changes so quickly and how on earth do you keep up with
that? Obviously, you need to click,
subscribe and listen to this podcast.
Anyway, I'm joking, but over to today's episode.
I hope you enjoy it. This is certainly not one to
miss. So Michaela, welcome to the show
and most importantly, true cable.
Welcome back. How are you?
Yes, thank you, Nick. I'm doing great.
Yes, it's Friday, so happy to be here.
Yeah, thanks for. Having me it is indeed.
It is indeed. And we were just joking that
we're both like got Friday feeling ready to go home at some
point in the next few hours. And there's a couple of really
long words in my questions that I probably won't use.
But anyway, it's so good to have you back.
Not you personally, but it's so good to have true cable back on.
And we obviously had you guys on back in 2021.
So if anyone can pause this episode right now and e-mail me
and remind me of anything we spoke about previously, I will.
We'll personally send you a well done on e-mail and a thumbs up
and a selfie if you can do that. But for anyone that doesn't
remember that episode, that hasn't come across true cable
before, give us a bit of an overview to what you guys do and
kind of how the business first got started would be amazing.
Yeah. So we got started back in 2015.
So I was not here at that time. I've been here for about 3 1/2
years, but 2015 is when we started True Cable.
So we're coming up on 10 years, but we're in the low voltage
industry. So we sell anything from
Ethernet cable to coax cable connectors, tools and then fibre
optic as well. So that's kind of the industry
that we're in. Amazing.
And I'm going to dive straight into a branding question because
something I asked a few brands recently in a similar space to
you here in the UK, obviously Ethernet cables as a thing are
they're not very exciting and a lot of data stuff.
I, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm just going to say like, if
you're doing your job really well, no one knows you're there.
So my question really is like, you guys actually have a really
fun and very educational brand. It teaches a lot of people about
what's going on. But like, how do you create that
on a product that itself? You're like, I could buy these
on Amazon, Walmart. How do you make it fun?
How do you build a brand around that kind of product?
Yeah, we actually say it all the time.
Like we don't sell a sexy product, right.
It's not fun to market like it's, it's a tough product.
I would say our people, we work together and our our people are
fun and exciting. If you were to come to like one
of our marketing meetings, you would see the energy and I think
that's what kind of helps us build that brand.
Obviously people by people as well, and you guys are in a very
kind of business to business space.
It's you probably don't get too many orders from someone going,
oh, I just need a new Ethernet cable to go from my router to my
laptop or my TV or something. And obviously, as you say, I
think people by people, How do you, how do you bring that
across in marketing that like on the website, in advert copy, in
e-mail? How do you bring the people to
the front like you? Do you literally sort of say
like this week in the highlight is is this team member going to
be on a live webinar or how do you bring that to life as a
business? Yeah, that's a great question.
So I think for us, we definitely are big on, we want to show our
customers that we are real people behind true cable, right.
So for example, customer success, if you were to call us
and you needed help or you had questions, you're going to get a
real person on the phone. And I think that that helps
build that trust with our customers.
And we do that same thing when it comes to marketing, right?
If you were to leave a review, we're going to answer every
single review. We read all of them.
We listen to our customers. If you give us feedback,
somebody in the company, whether it's marketing or customer
success, we're, we're listening, we're, we're taking that
feedback and we're making improvements.
Without our customers, there is no true cable, right.
So we want to hear our customers feedback.
We listen and I think that that's something that's special
about our company and that's something that's special about
our brand is that we are listening to our customers and
and making that feedback, taking that feedback and then making
those changes. Yeah, yeah.
I remember working with a company years ago.
I don't know if they're still running, but they're called
Crucial. And I used to buy RAM for
laptops back in the day when you could take a battery out of a
MacBook and just change the RAM. And it's the first thing you do
is you buy a Mac and instead of paying Apple for the better RAM,
you buy it from Crucial. But I remember that firstly,
they would always send you a little booklet, which is like
literally just two sides of how to get the battery out, how to
take the RAM out, put the new RAM in, put the battery and turn
it on, enjoy. And it was like, that was really
useful. But also when it's when live
chat had first come out. I'm a little bit older than I
look and I remember like going on their website the first time
and live chat just popped up going like, hey, what laptop
have you got and how much RAM do you need?
And I was like, oh, hello, yeah, I've got this laptop and I would
like, how much can I have and how much is it?
And they were like, click this link, Sir.
Let me know if you get any issues.
But that's the one for you. And it costs this much.
And he also said like an Apple would charge you $1000 for this.
And actually it's only 200 from us to use our RAM upgrades.
And so I think that kind of personal relationship, I mean
how much do you guys do kind of earlier in the sales journey as
much as the reviews and things are so useful to find out what
customers do doing and what they think, How much do you kind of
inject that in earlier in the journey as well that
conversation? Oh yeah, absolutely.
So I for us, especially when acquiring like new customers,
right, I don't know if you've seen.
So we have our cable Academy and then we also have our YouTube
channel that brings out a lot of personality, especially with
like our technical team, because we create video content showing
how to use our products in the real world.
And our technical team is amazing.
They have a great personality, they're funny.
And I think that's kind of what draws people into true cables,
watching those videos. We're helping them in the
beginning of their journey, right?
A lot of customers or installers are trying to learn how to
install this cable. And So what we do is we create
the content to show them, right? So we're showing them how to
create, how to how to do these installs with our products so
that once they learn how to do it, they're like, oh, OK, I know
I've seen this brand. And then that's how we get them
to then eventually purchase. So that's kind of how we
snatched them up in the beginning of the customer
journey is, is we're looking for, what are these customers
searching for in our industry online and then creating content
surrounded around what they're looking for.
Absolutely. And I love that because it's
what we do a lot in my agency here.
And it's almost become ausp of a marketing agency saying to the
client, like who actually is your customer and what do they
really want? Because you sell products and I
land on your website and there's Shopify collections, there's
product pages. I love to use the phrase
marketplace, like don't be a marketplace.
The marketplace just lists products and they might have
quite a good filtering system, but that's what Amazon does.
The value add is Amazon's delivery.
Amazon reviews Amazon loyalty points, you know, the free
delivery through Prime or and all the TV that comes with it,
etcetera. Like the value adds are not the
way they lay their website out, which actually means all of you
little brands that are not as big as Amazon, you guys have got
a real edge to bring that personality in.
But I love the fact you use the phrase snatching up those
customers almost like you're like, kind of like they're on a
journey to get to Amazon at some point to buy all their kit.
And you're like, no, no, no, no, we'll snatch them and bring them
into our universe and go actually it's, you know, forget
the pricing and everything else. Tell us what you're trying to
achieve, not what you want. And I think it's such a
certainly an IT, an infrastructure, It's so much
more powerful because you, you must be able to advise and
actually push like way more of a bundled solution.
So if someone says, oh, I'm trying to buy an Ethernet
because the Internet on my laptop's really slow and you
guys say it's not an Ethernet you need, you need this device
that does whatever and that changes things and it costs
more. But I can solve your problem,
not just give you the product you think you need.
It must be quite a powerful kind of tool for you guys.
Absolutely. And we've even taken it a step
further. If you were to look at our
website, we have like an Ethernet cable Finder and a
connector Finder, right? So if a customer is coming on
and they don't know exactly what they need, they can go through
this quiz and it'll, at the end of the quiz, give them exactly
the products that they need for their installation.
So we're here to help them and we provide those tools.
Nice, nice. And I think the quizzes are so
powerful. I've had clients make them and
no one's used them before as well because there's a whole
different we were able to wear that today.
There's a whole different topic of trying to get someone to
engage with something rather than just buy the products.
But I think certainly that that quiz, I guess if something that
I'm going to assume that that you guys know this for sure, but
I'm going to assume that actually a lot of people don't
really know what they want in your space.
And that's part of your most powerful kind of marketing tool.
Yes. So we have obviously a a tonne
of different Ethernet cables and if you don't know exactly what
you need for your installation, they're all used for different,
some are outdoors, some are indoors, some are risers, some
are plenums. So it's it's hard if you don't
know the industry and you're not a professional installer and
you're just trying to do this in your own home or you know,
you're a small startup business and you're putting it into your
new business. Yeah, most people don't know,
right. So we try to provide those tools
for those customers that may not know exactly what they need.
Maybe they don't want to call us, right?
Maybe they don't want to do a live chat.
So we created these tools so they can just go on like
self-service, they can go through.
It's like our technical team is walking them through it.
Our technical team built it out for them.
So it's, yeah, put that together just to help our customers
figure out exactly what they need.
Yeah, yeah. And I wonder, I don't know if
you're using AI already, but I do wonder it's in the IT space
where AI almost has an opportunity at some point in the
future where you can almost kind of talk to the AI and say, yeah,
we've got 2 Wi-Fi routers, We've got 92 machines to connect up 8
phones, a buzzer system on the door that calls one of the
phones. And the AI kind of goes, cool.
These are three components that could be a game changer for your
infrastructure, actually. And this one you could also buy
to monitor what's going on, which tells you what's wrong and
plug me into it and I'll tell you what you need to change.
But have you guys used AI at all at the moment?
Is that something that's that's kind of come into play?
So for those quizzes, no, they were hand built by our technical
team. I will say the.
Marketing team. The marketing team, we do use AI
just to help streamline some of our processes.
But where we kind of struggle, we're not necessarily struggle.
But the challenge with AI is, especially in marketing, we want
to keep that human touch. So we will use it for some
projects, but we're always tweaking it and we're never 100%
using AI for any of our marketing projects.
Like I said, we want to keep that human touch when it comes
to our marketing. So we will never fully use AI,
but we will use it for some things, you know, analysing data
or things like that. But yeah, it's used, but not for
like those quizzes and things like that.
Yeah, yeah. Now it makes a lot of sense.
And obviously I work a heck of a lot of my time and so did my
team in SEO and discussed the other day.
And I sort of said to my team, like, show me one thing that has
been written by AI that we've not tweaked.
We've purely checked and not tweaked, but is live on a
client's website. And everyone was like, oh,
there'd be loads. And when we started looking, we
were like, no, we had to change everything.
Not change everything, but every single thing we had to do
something to whether it's a mess description, on page description
and copy, that sort of thing. But I think, yeah, we're using
AI for similar things, I think to what you're saying as well.
Like if we're analysing data and you say to AI, here's 10 CSV
files, match up all of this stuff for me in a Google Sheet,
Go and use like ChatGPT for Google Sheets Waggon, which is
awesome by the way, everyone best.
Like I don't know what it costs, but it's like $15.00 a month or
something absolutely insane. But I think it speeds up that
process. But you've got to be so
prescriptive to AI. Like it can think for itself,
but it needs all of the ingredients to do any thinking.
It doesn't have the experience we do where you sort of say,
hey, could you do this for me? And it goes, ah, I've done this
100 times before. We've done this for 10 years.
Actually, what I think you need is this AI doesn't do that.
It just goes here's the result and it's wrong because it
doesn't understand the why. Well, we tried it with our
blogs, right, because it takes a lot of time for our technical
teams to write our blogs and we want to, you know, free up a
little bit more of their time to be able to help out customers
and work on product development. But we tried it out and it just,
the information just wasn't exactly what our technical team
wanted to share. So yeah, we, we've kind of gone
away from using AI for blogs and our, our technical team is still
fully writing those out for, for everyone.
It's just we focus on quantity or sorry, quality over quantity,
especially when it comes to like our blogs and we want to make
sure we're providing correct information.
So yeah, we, we did try it out for blogs, but we, we moved away
just because our technical team wasn't well, they weren't happy
with it. So.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm going to go.
I know we had five points to talk about and anyone listening
will not be surprised by this at all.
I haven't touched any of them yet.
We're kind of taking around a couple of them, but we've not
spoken about them. And we'll come back to him in a
SEC. But you've just mentioned
something that I think really interesting and actually quite
empowering is your technical team write a lot of the content
for the website. And it sounds obvious when I say
it like that, but I mean, I've met thousands of brands over the
years and hardly any of them really connect up.
Actually like the experts to the marketing bit.
It's normally like, oh, you're the marketing team, you write
the content and the marketing team are like, but we, we can
market things, but we need to know the things to market.
So like we need you to write the technical guide and then we can
push it out and get customers to engage with it and generate
leads as a real, you know, new sales as a as a result, it
almost sounds like you've got almost the complete company.
Are all content writers second after all of their first day
jobs? Is it?
Is it literally like that? Yeah.
So technical and marketing work extremely close together.
So we do have, I have somebody on my team who, who does SEO for
us. And So what he does is he'll go
through and he'll search the Internet, right.
And he's finding those topics that we're either not ranking
for keywords that customers are searching that maybe there's no
content out about. And we'll put all that together
in like a Google doc and we'll go to technical and we'll say,
hey, here's the things or the topics that marketing needs for
SEO purposes and technical. Then we'll be like, OK, well,
here I can write something about this or I can do a video about
this. I can, you know, create a, a
mock install about this and we can, you know, show how to do
that. So, and then from there, our
actual content creation studio room is in Kansas City.
So we travel two to three times a year and we go out and we
shoot all of our content. And then the technical team will
then create those blogs, add the videos.
So yeah, we work very closely together.
Technical is the ones that are writing the blogs and then
marketing will take it from there and add any additional
keywords or SEO that we need. But yeah.
Sounds like the dream set up. I wish if any of my clients are
listening, guys call me like we need to, we need to chat.
But I think, as I say, it's so important to have that 11
exercise we did years ago, which it was very different for your
brand, but for anyone that's listening that like you stock
other brands, so you have like a merchandising team.
I've spent a lot of time at TJ Maxx over the years and they
won't be saying this TK Maxx, we call them in the UK, but TJ Maxx
out in the US has spent a lot of time with the UK and European
teams here saying, look, why don't you buy this at this time
of year? Because three months after, if
you buy it in January, I know by March, April, people are
starting to search for it on SEO.
And so let's get it all on the site.
And they sort of said, oh, but that creates a warehousing
problem. So next thing you know, the SEO
guys explaining how much more warehousing space we need.
And it was just random projects, but it was like, OK, when people
are looking for prom dresses, now we're number one for prom
dresses like a month in advance. We've got loads on the shelves
and we're calling them prom dresses, not like party dresses,
going out dresses, etcetera, etcetera.
And if you were to search for like a maxi dress or a maxi
skirt, we're like, hey, is this for your prom?
We've got a whole prom category actually, because we know
January is the biggest month, even though prom seasons like
May to July, people are looking early and it's like getting
inside customers heads, I think is so key.
But so it's awesome you've got your teams linked up like that
because I think certainly with SEO you have that data which
your SEO person does, finding those keywords and seeing, OK,
people are talking about this, let's take a step back and have
a deep breath. What do we want to respond to
that search, that question, that query with?
And I love that you mentioned as well, like almost doing my job
for me here explaining how important SEO is.
But I think the thing you mentioned really, really clear
there as well is like, if there's no content about it, but
people are looking for it, it's hard to find those
opportunities. But when you do, it's like just
strike. We need a good we need that
content process to just strike and get it all set up quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, SEO is SEO in our blog
content is well, I guess that's the first question, but we can
get in a little bit later, but yeah, let's.
I mean, if that's the answer to the first question, so for
anyone saying I'm going, what is this first question, the first
question was supposed to ask Michaela, which marketing
tactics have shown the highest ROI?
Is it SEO by any chance? Maybe it might be.
OK, no spoilers. Go and tell us.
There's 2. So it's our content marketing.
And then our e-mail marketing is extremely big as well.
So content marketing, that's our cable Academy with our blogs and
our YouTube videos. I already dove into that a
little bit. But yeah, we're looking for
those topics that our customers want.
What are they Googling? You know, what are they looking
for? And we're creating that for
them. Maybe there's content out there
already about it, but we're going to do it better.
We're going to you know we're going to show them how to do
with our products. We have created a catalogue to
where everything works together as a system.
So we're going to show you how you can purchase everything with
us and you can do your entire install just by shopping at True
Cable. So that is one of the first ones
and then e-mail marketing that one is extremely huge for us
especially with repeat business. So we're sending out weekly
campaigns. We have a tremendous open rates.
Our customers are actually engaging with that content.
We in those emails we're sending out, you know, our blogs that
we're, that we're doing, customers are reading them,
they, they want to see the new blogs that we're putting out
every week. We're showing them new products
that we're launching, the new videos, things like that.
So our customers are engaging with those.
And then we also created flows, right?
So like abandoned cart, we're sending out reminders like, hey,
you started a cart last week, just want to remind you that
it's there. And that is also probably one of
our highest ROI's when it comes to marketing.
Awesome, awesome, right. I'm writing down a couple of
questions cuz I think there's some, there's some really good
mileage in some of the things you've said here actually.
And again, topics we get asked about a lot from you guys
listening at home. And 1st I'm going to say is your
finance director must love you guys.
SEO and e-mail are like two of the most cost effective
channels. It's not meta ads, it's not
Google ads, it's not like let's get the biggest, most world
famous influencer we can find and oh, they cost $1,000,000 a
minute. You know, which is not, not,
that is not a made-up fact. There's there's one influence
that one of our clients work with and it was 8 minutes cost
$8 million. Cool.
But yeah, there's a very lean way of doing things, which is
quite, very organic, which actually feels like you as a
brand, as a business and as a team, you're not trying to like
force things on people. You're just going, hey, you need
this. We'd love to, we'd love to help,
we'd love to chat. And it feels like that in terms
of your channel mixed up, your channel mix at the same time.
Yes. So especially to the website,
most of our traffic is organic. Now don't get me wrong, we do
paid ads like that is something that we definitely do, but we do
a darn good job of organically getting customers to the
website. So yeah, I'll ask our accounting
team today if they do love us for that, for that reason.
Well, Christmas is coming, so you can ask about Christmas
bonuses as well. A really good thing to put on
the agenda, but, but I think it's it's certainly a good thing
to do. And I remember, again, I can't
remember exactly who we had in the team.
And even in those first 30 days you can meet a load of
influencers and start promoting your product.
So there's no excuse. Go and install the app, start
the 30 day trial and give it a go yourself and see how you get
on. Which my memory is terrible as
to what I did yesterday, let alone three years ago.
But I remember when, when you guys were before, I remember a
real focus of our episode as well was around content.
So it's really cool actually to hear how that's evolved over the
last sort of three years and or nearly 3 1/2 years now, but how
it's evolved and still such a close part of close part of what
you guys do. I'm going to ask a slightly
sneaky question and feel free to say I'm not answering this.
It's our secret sauce. But you mentioned that e-mail
and abandoned carts and like a, hey, you've left this in your
cart. What would you say for you guys
is like a really good punchy call to action?
Like is it your cart's there? And it's just a kind of like,
you know, go and have a quick look, a very subtle thing.
Do you find it works? And then just like pick up the
phone and talk to one of our guys internally or like you put
some really complicated bits of kit in your cart yesterday, like
come and have a chat with us. Or have you seen this technical
guide where these those items exist?
Like how does it, how does it work best for you guys if you
found it in a band and basket? Yeah, that's a good question for
CTA. So I'll, I'll say this, we do a
lot of A to B testing. And just recently, this is not
just for emails, this is for the website as well.
There are certain words that increase conversion rate.
So we do a lot of A to B testing and that's kind of how we've
found our secret sauce. What those words are, I'll keep
to myself. However we do, we do a lot of A
to B testing. We definitely started honing in
on that this year and that's something we'll continue to do
moving forward. But A to B testing and finding
those, those words that are our customers, because it's every
customer is different, right, Depending on what industry
you're in, it's not going to be the same for every industry.
So figuring out what those words are and what our customers want
to see. So yeah.
You know, it's good and I mean AB testing we to be honest, we
haven't done enough episodes on it.
If I'm completely transparent, it's been the biggest focus for
our team for two years now is whether it's like running, which
I've kind of always done like 18 years now been running two ads
on Google ads side by side and going like right, use the
experiment feature in Google ads now like 50% of impressions
here, 50 here. This one gets less clicks, but
more revenue. Brilliant.
Less cost, more revenue. That's exactly what ROI is
better over here, but doing it on websites where it's you're
selling on the landing pages 4 DPC where it's like, all right,
if I give more product information, do I increase
conversion on desktop and or mobile?
And if I give less information, what happens then?
And you start to learn it. Your customer's like, I just
need this thing add to car, buy it.
It's all cool. And we just got the right three
bullet points at the top there. You know, I guess for your
customers as well, Like if it's a replacement product, more
likely to go, I just need a replacement Ethernet.
I'm already a customer. I've got the kit.
I just, I set fire or I cut through it or something,
something's gone wrong and I just need another one.
But then actually digging down into like more detail and where
people want more, I guess something you guys have probably
tested is like when in the customer journey to put in front
of them a here's a piece of like more explanative content around
how the system works, the kit, the wider thing, because you
it's always hard in in e-commerce, isn't it?
You don't want to interrupt that buying journey and go, I know
you're about to add to cart and give us your credit card number,
but read some fun stuff. It's like, no, no, not now, not
now, just get the purchase, but. Yeah.
And it's been a challenge I think for us because we have two
different types of customer bases and I think trying to to
feed both of them has been challenged.
We do a pretty good job of it right now, but that is a focus
for moving into 2025 is how do we kind of market those two
different customer bases and give them what each of them
need. Absolutely, absolutely.
And I think it's not unique, is it?
We've have quite a few clients of ours that are like, we do a
lot of wholesale. We want to go direct to
consumer. How do we market to both
audiences or we, we do loads direct to consumer, but actually
wholesale sounds fun. You know, one order $200,000,
say, hey, it's great. You know, if I could get two of
those a year, great. I'll bump the revenue up quite
nicely. So I think certainly having the
two audiences is a challenge. And what you don't want to do is
have a retail customer go, what's this kind of volume?
I just, I just need like 4 Ethernet cables for my small
business office versus someone who's like, I need 20.
Are you going to give me some sort of discount?
Like, you know, I need this, I need this kit for an entire St,
you know, of offices. But I mean, how, how important
would you say is like product diversification for you guys?
And that was the long word, by the way, my notes, everyone a
long word for a Friday. But how important is that?
Would you save for then drilling down to like, these are our best
sellers versus are not best sellers.
And the, you know, the alternative would be having a
really small, small product range where it's just like we
just have three products. Yeah.
So I'm obviously not in product development, I'm in marketing.
But what I can say, and it goes back to our same thing in
marketing, right, we focus on quality over quantity.
So when we first started out back in 2015, we were just
strictly bulk Ethernet cable. You can go on the website and
kind of see what that looks like.
But we've expanded since then. We've gone into Ethernet now,
tools, connectors, coax, fibre and, and we have a lot of plans
to continue increasing our catalogue going into 2025.
But we're not just throwing any products out there.
Every single product goes through testing with our
technical team. And I can tell you right now, if
they don't like it, we're not selling that product.
And it'll go back. It'll go back, we'll try again
and we'll recreate and then we'll test again.
And if our technical team says no again, we'll go back to the
drawing board. So quality over quantity, 100%
when it comes to product development, we're not just
going to put a product out there because we want to get a sale.
We're going to put a product out there because we actually truly
believe in it. Yeah.
And you guys are obviously playing the long game there of
going even if sales are really slow on day one, we believe in
this product. We know we're going to get the
reviews long term and then in five years it could be a best
seller. But like it's you guys must have
been trading for nine years now as well, which is a really
amazing amount of time. I you always staggered by the
stats of how many Shopify stores start and stop in like 6 months.
Yeah, certainly during COVID it was a particularly bad thing.
But I've certainly found that over the years, like saying no
in sales conversations or even in marketing can also be really
powerful. So do you guys ever like
actually push content out to say like, look, you all you guys are
all our customers, you're all asking for this.
But actually there's a reason we're not going to do it.
There's a reason we're not going to change the product or build a
new product or provide that ourselves.
Do you guys ever go to market almost with like a no marketing
strategy rather than a yes yes strategy?
Absolutely. Especially like if somebody
comments our technical team. So if it's like a technical
comment or somebody's asking a question, our technical team
writes it out for us and we. Actually.
We post it but absolutely like if there's a reason for
instance. Not that I don't know how
familiar you are, but like CAT7 and CAT8, there's, there's
certain reasons that we don't sell that and our technical team
will will tell them we have videos on CAT5V versus CAT6
versus Cat 7 and and why we don't have those products.
So yeah, we are fully transparent with what we're
carrying, why we're carrying it. Like I said, we listen to our
customers. So on our website we have a
product questionnaire. So if our customers want to send
us feedback or give us ideas of like what they want to see, new
products being launched, they can fill out that questionnaire
and send it over. And our technical team reviews
it. And that kind of helps us guide
product development. So we know what our customers
want and we're getting it straight from the source.
So yeah. And I guess another thing as
well is given your type of product, you're going to get a
load of business purchases. And if a small customer comes
along, someone like me, small team, I buy everything for the
team. Like it's my credit cards, my
decision. It's a very different equation
to when it's like, OK, I'm the finance director or the buying
group director or something of a bigger organisation.
And actually I need to justify to someone why I've bought what
I've bought. And it's a lot easier to justify
if they get a bit of content from you and go, well, I spoke
to these guys actually, and I wanted to go like cat A or, you
know, CAT50, let's go in the future slightly.
But yeah, I wanted to buy the best number I could.
And they told me actually it's a marketing gimmick.
I don't, we don't need that at all.
So I've gone and saved us like 80% actually on our.
So I told you, I do know about about different cat cables, but
I think they're, yeah, saving a bit of money actually by going.
And we don't need to invest in the biggest in the best.
We just need the one that's right for us.
Yep, absolutely. Cool.
Cool, cool. And let's talk about data then,
because obviously marketing revolves around data.
And there's always this argument between the creative people that
came up with the whole like some idea that made it all work in
the 1st place anyway. So we can't ignore them.
And there's always a bit of an argument between them and the
data people who say, like, proof to me, it's going to work,
otherwise you can't do it. And there's always a little bit
of push and push and pull. What sort of metrics do you guys
as a business, as a Shopify store, as a marketing team, what
kind of metrics and KPIs are you just constantly gripped to, you
know, is there a particular one or two that are like more
important than anything? How do you guys monitor?
Yeah, I would say it truly depends on what marketing we're
looking at. Is it social media?
Is it e-mail? Is it, you know, SEO?
But what I will say is when I first started at True Cable and
moved over to the marketing department, we were obviously
still a little bit younger. So the the biggest goal was just
to push content out to get, you know, our brand name out there.
And I think now we're at a .2024.
I really, really challenged the marketing team to look at data
and look at analytics and let's guide our marketing strategy
based off of that. And so that's what they've truly
been focusing on this year and they've done a tremendous job
and that's something we'll continue to do next year.
We're a lean team. I've said that a couple of
times, I believe, but we're not you.
You may look at our website and think we're a huge company, but
we're truly not. I can name every single person
that works at True Cable in every single department.
So we are a small team. So one thing that we're really
focusing on, especially this year and next year is just
prioritisation, right? What, what marketing strategies
are really working well for us and let's let's focus on those.
So I know you mentioned you were asking about what data and KPI's
we're looking at, but it truly just depends on what what we're
looking at. Is it e-mail marketing?
Is it social media marketing? A couple I can name off is
obviously for emails, click through rates.
How often are our customers actually clicking on our
content? What content are they clicking
on the most, Right, because we want to obviously give them what
they're looking for, social media engagement, views, things
like that. Website conversion rates
obviously is what I'm looking at heavily.
Yeah. Those are just a couple that
we're looking through fairly often on the marketing team.
Awesome. And what I love is it's not just
probably what I would probably put in there is somebody who
works purely on search is like, right, we spent that, we got
this ranking, how much money have we made?
I love that you guys actually again back to the ethos.
The first thing you told us is like, we want to help our
customers and actually you're focused on where are we engaging
with them? Are they opening our emails,
reading our content and are they engaging with us on social?
Because you know that if you do that, you're going to be front
of mine when they're like, I need something, these guys sell
it. I'm going straight to them
regardless of, you know, not specifically true cable, just
any, any brand of that stage. But I certainly, it's
interesting you say about the teams that focusing on analytics
and analysis, the amount of businesses we've come into and
we've actually taken on. And I shouldn't, I won't name
any names. I shouldn't say too much about
this because I don't want to look bad.
But certainly a few brands we've taken on recently as clients in
the last few weeks, a lot of them don't even have GA 4 set up
or they're on Shopify and GA 4 is there, but it's not recording
revenue or product views or add to carts.
And we kind of come in and go and like, Oh yeah, you know,
here's our pitch, we can change this change.
This doesn't take long, but then once we get the data, then
there's kind of phase two kicks in, which is trying to train the
marketing team at the client as well.
Like you guys need to be looking at this.
You know, you keep throwing stuff at the wall to see what
sticks, but then you don't see what's actually stuck.
You don't see what customers are actually using, clicking on,
engaging with. And we certainly had one
situation recently where we did acro test with the client and
the result came back and I was like, surely this is one of the
best. It's my idea to launch this
thing. So trying to be biassed.
I was like, surely this is the best bit of revenue uplift we've
ever seen. It's like 3 times as good, Three
times every dollar you make here on version A, you make $3 on
version B. We're rolling it out and they're
like, oh, I don't know, the conversion rates dropped.
I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't care.
Look at the average order value. This is perfect.
Less orders to send out, you offer free deliveries, less
deliveries paid for, less customers to manage with three
times the revenue. Like literally buying 3 products
instead of 1 and they're like, Oh yeah, but we were trying to
improve the conversion rate on this.
It's like just banging my head against the wall.
Like come on guys. If it's not to grow revenue,
what is the I can make your conversion rate incredible If we
start selling products at a pound each, it's not, it's not
going to help. So I think it's an amazing
journey you're on, but there must be some Rd bumps in that
sometimes as well. I think with the team and you
know, we're going to sit into too much detail because
obviously some of them will listen to this as well, but they
sound amazing. And sometimes you'll, yeah,
you'll find that someone's like, wow, look at this one step.
And my point being is no, no, you've got to look at the whole
picture. You know, look at the whole,
it's great people are reading that article, but we're just
giving them the answer and it doesn't involve any of our
products. So we're getting traffic.
We're giving away, you know, content for free and then
they're leaving and not buying anything.
I've also seen that where it's like we thought it was
successful. There's no conversion.
Well, in that, yes, I guess two things to go off of that.
That's something we've worked with like the technical team on,
right? Because they'll come up with
ideas and like, oh, this is a content that we want to push out
and we look, you know, in the back and then we're like
nobody's searching for that. So maybe one customer had that
question, but is the time that you're going to spend writing
that article for one customer that may not ever purchase, is
that worth it? Right.
So, and that's, that's a battle because we want to be able to
provide all content that we can. We want to give all answers that
we can, you know, so it's a struggle to figure, you know, to
find that balance, but I feel like we do a fairly good job of
doing that, providing the the main information that's needed
that will also help the business.
So. Yeah, absolutely.
And we do the podcast as well. Every episode we're like, what
are people looking for on YouTube, on Google?
What other episodes are out about this?
Which ones have the most likes, the most reviews?
Like we look at that engagement and go, right, let's do an
episode on this, for example. But you always get that one
where you're like, this is going to be fun for our existing
listeners. It's not going to gain any new
ones. You put it out and go, oh, look,
we've gone viral. How hilarious.
I was not expecting that. But obviously you guys, you're
doing a really good job of it. And it sounds like it's evolved
so much since I last spoke to to some of the team at True Cable.
But that also comes with challenges, doesn't it?
There's challenges around scaling.
You don't want to scale too fast if you, if something's not
working and I say it's the clients all the time, if
something's not working, we definitely don't want to scale
that. You're going to, you want to
scale a solution, not a problem. What kind of challenges have you
guys come up against with with scaling?
Yeah, especially in the marketing team, digital
marketing moves fast. You have to stay up to date with
trends and things are changing constantly.
So I for the marketing team specifically, we really focus on
or the biggest challenge is our pipeline is completely full.
We have so many projects that we want to dip our hands into.
We have, you know, so many different things that we want to
do and we just can't do it all. So the biggest challenge is
coming together as a marketing team and saying, hey, what's
really, you know, impacting the bottom line here?
What can we truly focus on that's going to to grow this
company basically. So really the, the word we've
been using this year is prioritisation.
We have to prioritise our projects and we have to do those
that are going to help the business 1st.
And then we can get to some of these other projects where they
sound cool. Maybe it maybe it'll help the
business, right? But we just don't know.
But we do know that, you know, these, you know, XY and Z, this
will actually really help push the needle.
So let's focus on those first. So I'd say that's probably the
biggest challenge is just because we are a lean team, we
have to prioritise a little bit, a little bit more than maybe
bigger companies just because we just don't have that many people
to help. So now as the business grows,
the marketing team grows, right. We grew last year, we're going
to continue to grow this year and then also next year.
So we'll we'll continue to do that, but we will always be a
lean team. So prioritisation will always be
extremely important for the marketing.
Team and I think that's I usually use the phrase like no
idea is a bad idea. I now don't believe in that at
all. I actually do think there are
ideas we could quantify as a bad idea.
And I think it's as you said, it's a prioritisation.
What is the North Star? And I think you mentioned the
phrase bottom line, I couldn't agree more.
It's what actually pushes the business and actually going back
to what you were saying about AB testing as well.
It's like whenever, like even with the podcast, whenever my
team are like, hey, Nick, we should, we should do this.
We should send out a short version of the episode and a
long 1. And I'm always like, all right,
we'll do. And we literally if anyone wants
to go and see on our YouTube channel, we put out, I think it
was either 3 or 4 short versions that were like 6-7 minutes long.
And we put out the main version. The main version's getting like
1 to 5000 views a week. And the short version, I think
the best one was about 80. And I was like, we tried it
guys, we tried it and it's not working.
So we we might have actually taken them down now.
I think they might still be there.
In fact, if they're not there, I'm going to make sure they are
there at the time of this episode going out so you guys
can go and see the difference. But yeah, short versions don't
work on YouTube. People want to watch the whole
thing. And so that's been fascinating.
Like just an example of like little tests that you do to see
what happens. But certainly with the amount of
content you guys write as well, some of it must be like, right,
we wrote this bit of content and we've had like 10 hits on it
from SEO this week. But we think we're going to get
10 hits a week for 10 years now. That adds up.
There's quite a bit of content actually.
And it's going to help, you know, if we can release ten of
those a month, like actually it does start to work and start to
build the, the overall profile. Say, going back to exactly what
you're saying about analysis and analytics, you guys must have
the same thing of going, look, we're willing to try it, but as
you say, let's prioritise what we think is going to be the
biggest thing based on what we've done previous.
Oh, yeah, we're big on throwing things at the wall and seeing
what sticks. Our CEO says that all the time.
Yeah, we, we will try anything once, right?
If, if we all are like, hey, let's give it a shot.
And we all agreed to try it. Yes, absolutely.
Because you'll never know if you don't try, right?
That's with anything in life. But yeah, absolutely.
We, we love to try new things because I think that's what
makes us different. We're we're not afraid to try
new things and, and we're willing to take those risks.
So, and that's something I'm, I'm grateful for to be a part of
a company that allows us to take those risks, right.
I'll go up to, you know, my boss or the CEO and say, hey, like,
here's an idea we have. And, you know, they're like, OK,
Michaela, like let's give it a shot.
Check analytics and, and, and we'll see how it is in a year.
And if it works, great. If it doesn't, then we move on
to the next. So yeah, that's a huge part of
true Kim. I think that's what makes us so
successful. Yeah, yeah.
And you have to have a good business in the 1st place.
They don't you, because all this stuff costs time, it costs
money. So we've quite a few clients,
especially on Giga Lads, for example, where we say, right,
10% of the budget. So if the target's 5 to one,
we're going to add another 10%. So we're going to make it 5.5 to
one. Now we can use 10% of the
budget. It's a really simple bit of
math, 10% of the budget we can now whack into testing and we
can actually spend it on whatever we want.
But we've got to achieve that 5.5 first to then know we've got
that extra room to play with. And every time we find
something, it's like you go from being the finance director's
worst nightmare of like, why are we spending 10% of our budget in
this thing? It doesn't work to suddenly
like, how much could we spend on that thing?
And it's like, yeah, we could spend more.
Yeah, absolutely. Cool, cool.
Well, look, I really appreciate your time.
OK, It's been great to chat to you and we'll bring things into
land here. But most important question, if
someone's listening to going, you guys sound awesome, like I
want to see the business, see your social media and everything
else is going on. What's the web address?
What are your social handles? How can people reach out and see
see the amazing work you're doing?
Yes, truecable.com, you can search us up on TikTok,
Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and then definitely YouTube.
Check it out. That's where you'll see all of
our faces on there. You'll see our content.
And then, yeah, if anybody's interested in our cable Academy,
that's on our website as well. Amazing, amazing.
And one of my team did make a joke earlier because my surname
is Truman. Nick, if you've got some sort of
shareholding in true Cable, I don't.
I do love the name, but I don't it's one of my one of my team
were asking like have you you're running a second business we
don't know about. But no, I used to have a company
called True Line, though, which was very similar to true cable.
Anyway, Michaela, I really appreciate your time.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It's been great to chat and I really appreciate all the
insights you shared with us today.
Yes, yes. Thank you, Nick.
It's been a pleasure. Awesome and for everyone
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