Mark: Today on Power Tips Unscripted. We talked to Jesse Stein, founder and CEO of Audience Scale. Digital marketing is where it’s at, right? I mean, everyone’s online, so why not? But did you know you can increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing with handwritten notes? You better believe it. Jesse’s here to explain how in just a minute.

Victoria: Hi, I’m Victoria Downing and welcome to Power Tips Unscripted where we talk about tips, tactics and techniques to help you build a strong, profitable remodeling company. And I’m here with my co-host, Mark Harari.

Mark: Good afternoon.

Victoria: You know, I believe strongly that business is business as business and that one industry could learn from another, right, 100%. So talking to entrepreneurs is always exciting because there’s always something you can learn no matter where they come from.

Mark: There’s always something to learn everywhere.

Victoria: I know, right. And that’s that’s part of what makes this so exciting to be in business I love it. It’s great. So let’s dive.

Mark: Into having a podcast. We can get all this firsthand I know.

Victoria: Right. So I’m like taking notes for us in every episode to hopefully our listeners are getting even more out of this. But let’s kick it off, shall we?

Mark: Kick away.

Victoria: Jesse Stone has an impressive background as a serial entrepreneur. I love it. He’s founded, grown and sold multiple ventures throughout his career, including sports memorabilia.com, a skincare brand, and diet spotlight.com. Jesse also holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a BA from University of California, Santa Barbara. Welcome, Jesse.

Jesse: Thanks, Victoria and Mark.

Victoria: Yeah, nice to have you. So how did you get started as a technology entrepreneur?

Jesse: Just right place, right time. Graduated from Wharton in 98. And that was just kind of the beginning of the commercial internet. Late 90s started my first company in 99, was mercifully short lived, but learned how to, build sales funnels, buy online media. This was right around the time Google launched only about 10,000 days ago and, helped build some companies.

Jesse: Just got really lucky. if you guys have the entire podcast, I’ll tell you about all the things that have not worked out. Next 60s I’ll tell you about the things that have, but I ended up starting an interactive agency in the year 2000 that grew into a big, agency sold in 2005, and right around that time started buying internet domain names.

Jesse: So I bought CBS.com banking.com boating.com barbecuing, dot com one.

Victoria: Darn it.

Mark: So so every time I went on there they were all taken.

Jesse: Well they were taken then too. But yeah, the one that really took off was sports memorabilia.com. And with a team of people infinitely smarter and more talented than me, we built it into the biggest autograph store on the internet. Top 500 internet retailer sold it to fanatics, and we were sending handwritten notes to our clients at the time.

Jesse: But actually having contractors and assistants and other people handwrite the notes. We noticed it worked really well, but there was no scale to it. The handwriting? Yes. Harassing. So that’s that led to Audience echo, which is my current venture, where we have about 350 handwriting robots that hold pens and write exactly like humans, and they write the note and the envelope.

Jesse: And then what we do is we follow up with digital marketing. And so you send the note and then we find all the email addresses and social handles of all the note recipients. And we follow up. So using the note as a Trojan horse. And that combination it works spectacularly well. So that’s kind of how I got started in the late 90s though.

Victoria: So have you ever worked for somebody else?

Jesse: I have I worked, I believe, most of my 20s in Tokyo, Japan, and went to college there. And my first job out of undergrad was door to door sales in Japanese and oh wow, knock on doors and humbling, very humbling job. And then I was a journalist over there in Japan for about four years for Dow Jones.

Jesse: And then, got lucky to sneak my way into into Wharton. And so I came back. And then after Wharton, I worked for a year for somebody, and software and then struck out on my own in 99.

Victoria: So it’s a really interesting angle you’ve got on it now. So you I understand that you how you do it sort of the robots, the finding, the handles and all. What sort of digital follow up or what’s the campaign look like that follows up? It is it, what are you when you were sending those to your customers, it wasn’t to get leads or was it?

Victoria: What are all purposes right.

Jesse: At the time, what we were doing was we were nurturing current clients. And so so there’s two main buckets for sending handwritten notes. One is to, generate new business and break through to prospects. And the notes do a phenomenal job of taking an ice cold lead and warming that lead up. And so if you’re especially if you’re a remodeler and you a customer is worth a lot of money to you, but the decision to for a prospect to move forward with you is a big decision.

Jesse: So you want them to you want to stay top of mind and the note does a great job if you engineer it with exactly the right handwriting and a beautiful graphic on the front, that household, that homeowner will keep the note and display the note, and then when they are interested in remodeling their kitchen or whatever, you’re going to be top of mind and you follow up and then further your question.

Jesse: So how do you follow up? So the way you first of all, the most important thing by far in digital marketing is to what I call just give, give, give, give and then get. And so it’s creating really useful content and building that trust. And I’m I know you guys talk a lot about this on your podcast, but it’s building expertise authority and trust.

Jesse: And so the way to do that and as you guys know, trust is a delicate thing. And so because people have antennae behind antennae that are picking up on are you really selling me. So what we do with our notes and with our follow up is it’s all about guiding more, educating more, serving more, being the very, very best at answering questions and mitigating problems and helping and being a service.

Jesse: And if you can do that via not only the handwritten notes, but all the follow up. And so the follow up is everything, right? It’s you need to be everywhere where your prospects are. So your prospects are some will, you know, go to Amazon and buy marks book. Others will listen to your podcast. Others will, that are completely obsessed with YouTube videos, long form YouTube.

Jesse: There’s others that are on TikTok. And so what I look for and my background’s digital marketing. And so we send these notes. And the most important thing is to think about where are the underpriced advertising impressions. In other words, like Facebook. It’s really hard to break through and get organic engagement on a platform like Facebook because it’s so mature.

Jesse: And so the two platforms where you really want to focus. I like when the whole herd is going up one side. I like to kind of go the other way. Okay, so two platforms. First is LinkedIn, second one is TikTok. And by the way, this doesn’t I just want to add value to listeners. This really does help me per se.

Jesse: And so I’m interested in just again assisting and helping. So LinkedIn LinkedIn and TikTok, those two are Facebook circa ten years ago in terms of opportunity. And so you have tons and tons of remodelers, real estate agents, mortgage folks, insurance folks quietly crushing it on those two platforms. So what do you do? LinkedIn is the master of the written word.

Jesse: And so it’s 802,000 word articles once a week you want to post those articles and what’s incredible is unlike Instagram, unlike Facebook where you post something and minutes later it disappears off of people’s feeds on LinkedIn, when you post an article, it can stay up there for weeks, literally. And so you want to post content that helps and advises and educates.

Jesse: And then TikTok. TikTok is no longer for selling, you know, hoodies to 14 year olds.

Victoria: And I still think of it that way, I gotta say.

Jesse: Right, right. And a lot of people do, and the people that are crushing it on LinkedIn want us to think about TikTok in that way. Oh, that’s just for kids. Remember, that’s exactly what was said about Facebook back in the day. Yeah, it’s just for college students. Remember that?

Victoria: Yeah.

Jesse: No, it’s just for young people. It’s just for this. It’s just for that. Meanwhile, the wave completely passes you by. And so TikTok is embarrassingly easy to break through on. And the ad impressions when you actually buy media on TikTok, very inexpensive. And so the name of the game is these 800,000 word articles on on LinkedIn. And you can post even one a month to get started.

Jesse: You’ll be completely blown away about how easy it is. It’s like, you know, cutting through butter with a hot knife in terms of getting organic engagement and then TikTok. Here’s the diabolical shortcut with TikTok, right? TikTok’s all vertical video okay, so it’s holding your phone up vertically. And the little secret is that for the first time in the history of the commercial internet, in the history of social media, all the platforms now are native vertical.

Jesse: So YouTube, you may have noticed YouTube shorts, right? Which is off like wildfire that is native vertical. So when you shoot a vertical video on TikTok, you can also use, piece of software like Hootsuite to automatically upload it as well to YouTube. Guess what? Instagram is native vertical. Facebook now native vertical. And 80% of your audience is on their phone, so they’re going to be holding their phone vertically.

Victoria: Guess what.

Jesse: Yeah, they’re Twitter has native vertical now. So in one fell swoop, a single video, all you need to do is look into your camera and give, give, give, give. And then you’ll eventually get. But you hold it vertically. Talk about what you know. That’s it. You’re not getting advice. You’re not saying this is the way you should remodel, this is the way you should do a project.

Jesse: No, you’re just saying, hey, this is my experience. This is what I know. So let’s shoot that vertically, distribute it out to the platforms, distribute those articles on on LinkedIn. You’ll be blown away.

Victoria: That is awesome. Some great tips. Know when you’re thinking about, audience echo and some of the things you do. Is it mainly B2B, B2C? How does that shake out?

Jesse: Yeah, we work with we work with a bunch of remodelers who crush it. with us, we work with a lot of real estate agents. So we deal directly with small and medium sized businesses who then deal with, clients. But also we have a lot of folks who will use our notes to reach out to prospective, vendors as well.

Jesse: So they’ll, they’ll then reach out. So the remodelers might reach out to interior decorators and others who would be perfect sales channels for them. And the notes perform at eight times the rate of, normal direct mail. And so it’s just a really easy way to break through to anyone who’s, you know, attention. You want to get.

Victoria: So if there’s oh after you Mark.

Mark: Well, so does the, I assume so it’s maybe, a handwritten note from, like, the business owner or from a salesperson or something. And then how does how does the signature work? Does it just kind of fake out a signature by the person?

Jesse: Yeah. So we don’t replicate your handwriting or your signature. just for privacy reasons. You don’t want your signature out there. You don’t want.

Victoria: It right.

Jesse: There. So we have 15 different handwriting styles and our robots, right, with the same exact pressure, slant and flow as a human. So we’re the only ones with this technology and even very up the left and right margins, the character spacing, no one is the same, no one is same. And here’s here’s a little secret is the handwriting is unusually easy on the eyes.

Jesse: So the penmanship is unusually clear. People, even if they think.

Victoria: They have clear.

Jesse: Penmanship, they generally don’t. And so what’s happening is you’re sending this note, you’re, let’s say, a remodel or you’re sending a note to a thousand interior decorators because you want to cultivate relationships in a referral network. So you’re sending those notes out. The handwriting is so clear. And we do a local. We do a graphic on the front of the note that is of a local landmark that’s esthetically beautiful, and we run it through our filters to create this beautiful like impressionistic keepsake, artsy five and our notes are all bifold, and so they invite you to keep and display it so that interior decorator might say, you know what?

Jesse: I’m not. I don’t have a time right now or I don’t want to think about referring business or cultivating a new relationship right now. But that note will end up on their kitchen counter on their home, right on the refrigerator, on their mantle. And then when they are interested that, remodel is going to be top of mind.

Jesse: So that’s kind of like the secret formula.

Mark: Do you offer discounts for bad handwriting?

Jesse: No, we just want send the note. Sorry.

Victoria: Okay.

Mark: Okay. cool. So I also, when kind of looking up some stuff about you there, you’ve got all kinds of little hacks and things like that, and I’m a, I’m big on hacks. I’m all about my hacks. You have 1 or 2 you can share.

Jesse: Yeah. For sure. So, the LinkedIn hack, the 802,000 word articles is worth its weight in gold. I can tell. Emphasize that one. the TikTok vertical video hack is a great one. here’s I mean, I could go on and on and on. I literally have hundreds and hundreds of these hacks. I’ll give you a great one for Remodelers.

Jesse: So a lot of people, when they’re starting their kind of digital presence, they don’t really know which way to go, and they end up hiring a consultant or whatever who often leads them astray. So they run enthusiastically in the wrong direction. They waste a bunch of money on their website or on an SEO company or whatever, and then they kind of throw their hands up and say, digital is not for me.

Jesse: So if you can just keep your true north and realize that it’s all about building expertise, authority and trust. And this whole concept of give, this, give, give, give and then get later and never. So the cringiest thing of all is when people get on social media and they tell you the way that you should do it, and they kind of wag their finger at you and say, this is the way you should remodel this is that this is and it’s like, it’s kind of like the difference between saying, you should have oatmeal for breakfast.

Jesse: And I had oatmeal for breakfast. And this is what this is, this is what I do, and this is what I’ve learned. Whether you decide to move forward with it or not is totally your choice. But I’m not preaching it. You.

Mark: So.

Jesse: Right. Here’s the hack. Go to Google. You type in your head keyword, which means your main keyword, like the keyword that you would loved, that has the most volume that you would love to get rank for. Let’s say it’s, Baltimore Remodeler or Baltimore Remodeling Company. Okay. Let’s say that’s your that’s your head keyword. So you type that in and then you scroll down and Google search results.

Jesse: A lot of people know this section. It’s called people also ask and yeah, every almost every Google search results page you’ll see this. And most people recognize that section. People also ask and all that is is like more questions down there. And a lot of people wonder, what is this? Well, there’s a lot of meat on the bones of this in terms of a hack.

Jesse: So what you do is you scroll down, you click on the questions there, okay. When you click on the questions it spawns more questions. What are these? These are the most authoritative questions that Google with all its algorithmic, with all of its computer processing power, believes are the most authoritative questions in your space. So what you’re doing is in one fell swoop by typing in Baltimore, remodeling, you are looking at all the most authoritative questions in your space.

Jesse: So what you do is you take those questions, drop them into a spreadsheet. Okay, that’s column colon A is the keyword you typed in. Let’s make this actionable okay. So your listeners can go and right away they can make more money. So column is the keyword you typed in Baltimore Remodeler or Remodeling company. Column B is the questions.

Jesse: Okay. Take those one by one. Drop them into the spreadsheet. Now more important than the questions are the answers okay. The answers these are like 50 to 100 word answers that Google has deemed to be by far the most authoritative out of the thousands and thousands and thousands of answers to all these different questions. These are the ones that Google has chosen.

Jesse: So I want you to take those answers. Throw them in a column, see next to each of the corresponding questions. Then what you’re going to do is you’re going to have all of these rewritten. If you are familiar with ChatGPT, find and put them in and have them rewritten there. Okay, no problem. But you can also have them rewritten very inexpensive, very efficiently and professionally by going to a website like Ryder access.com, wri tr access.com.

Jesse: This is like the Uber of writers. Oh there you can also go to upwork.com. But but Ryder access is phenomenal. I’ve been using it for many years. I’ve been using text Broker as well. Go to Ryder Access and then have the writers rewrite each of those answers twice. And what two copies of those. And there’s method to my manners.

Jesse: I’ll just explain it in a second. This is like going to save you literally months, probably years of running enthusiastically in the wrong direction. In digital marketing. It does. It kills so many birds with one stone. So have the writers rewrite all of those answers. And I want you to max out at 100 answers. I don’t want you to get to like, ambitious with this thing right away.

Jesse: So when you’re clicking on the questions, remember when when you saw the people also asked section, you’re clicking and it’s spawning more questions like maxed out at 100 okay. And then have the writers rewrite all those answers. And then I want you to do two. Now you have two sets of answers that are rewritten, totally original content. Remember, you cannot post duplicate content on Google.

Jesse: So what you do is take one set of answers and I want you to create the be all, end all most amazing fake you anyone has ever seen among any Baltimore remodeler ever. Okay. And so you take that the first set of answers and post them as a fake Q on your site. And what what will happen is you will get ranked, but also 50% of all searches now are voice search, Siri, Alexa, and the way voice work, what is Siri, Alexa and other voice search devices?

Jesse: Love. They love short, snappy answers. Guess what? There’s no other remodeler none of your competitors will ever create short, snappy answers to the top hundred most asked questions you just did. Second set of answers I want you to go to correct com Q you are a, fellow lefty. I love it, Mark. so I want you to go to Quora.

Jesse: Com and this is the question and answer website that Google has a total love affair with. So Quora is an amazing backdoor into Google. Take your second set of answers and I want you to go to Quora. Find people that are asking those questions, and you weigh in with those answers. If they haven’t asked the question, you can ask the question and answer it.

Jesse: And what’ll happen is rising tide lifts all ships. Yep. You will see that you’re out there contributing to the web and answering questions, and it’ll elevate the rankings for your FAQ answers as well. So those two things. It sounds complicated, but I like things when people give me step by steps, they’re actionable that actually lead to money. You will be blown away by this 92% of your prospects, and will research you before they actually move forward.

Jesse: And they’re going to ask all kinds of questions. Baltimore. There’s Baltimore that all kinds of questions you’re going to be coming up. And it’s kind of this feeling that all roads lead to matter. So that’s the people also ask at.

Mark: Your like that was awesome. Thank you so much. It’s a great. All right. So on that awesome note let’s move on to the lightning round. What do you think.

Jesse: Let’s do it.

Mark: Oh and now here’s a reminder that it’s lightning round.

Jesse: It’s a drop.

Mark: All right I’m putting 60s on the clock. What is your favorite business book and why?

Jesse: it has to be high Output Management by Andy Crüe’s in the 1980s, the incredible CEO of Into Our Road to high output management. Sounds technical, but is a phenomenal guide to, setting goals and staying focused.

Mark: If you weren’t a technology entrepreneur, what do you think you’d be doing?

Jesse: And I’d be teaching entrepreneurship and digital marketing.

Victoria: And,

Mark: What do you not very good at?

Jesse: A lot of things. needless to say, both my parents are artists, yet I am just, that gene completely passed me by it. So anything related to art? Sculpting, painting. I could barely kick a musical instrument down a stairwell.

Mark: Your room, your desk for your car. Which would you clean first?

Jesse: All the about. I’m very OCD about that. Everything is pretty. Pretty spotless. In fact, it’s not even OCD because that’s not an alphabetical order. It’s CBC.

Victoria: No,

Mark: Name a thing you refuse to share.

Jesse: I’m a pretty transparent open book, and I love to do that. Give, give, give. Yeah. So nothing comes to mind immediately about what I wouldn’t be willing to share.

Mark: Name a movie you’ve seen more than ten times.

Jesse: Shawshank Redemption.

Mark: Oh that’s great. That’s just because it’s always on.

Victoria: Yeah.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. It’s not. It’s a good audience. Pun intended. Yeah.

Victoria: so, Jesse, how do we learn more if our listeners want to learn more about audience.com and some of the things you’re doing, what where would they go? How do they find you?

Jesse: Do not go to audience.com. Please go back up. No, no, I’m glad you said it because a lot of people say that it’s audience.co Co you can go there. There’s absolutely no obligation. We don’t sell you. We show you the platform. In a quick zoom call. We show you the handwriting robots. We send you a sample. It’s customized to you with a beautiful graphic on the front.

Jesse: So go to audience.co and you can learn more.

Mark: All right.

Victoria: So now this has been great. But before I let you go I want you to share your five words of wisdom with our listening audience. And tell us why they resonate with you.

Jesse: Yeah, I actually thought about this one. I love the, poet Rumi from many centuries ago. Persian poet. What hurts you blesses you. So I’ve always been a fan of looking at, situations that have tried me and not only situations, but I think the people that have pushed my buttons the most, I’ve realized, are my master teachers.

Jesse:

Victoria: That’s interesting. Very fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. Where are you located physically?

Jesse: Miami, Florida. Okay.

Victoria: All right. Great. Jesse, thank you so much for being here. This has been awesome. We appreciate you. And I’m going to start right out taking advantage. Some of these hacks.

Jesse: Thank you both.

Victoria: Well man I got some ideas now that’s weird stuff. Yeah yeah. Dang I’m going to start getting on LinkedIn. You know I was I meant to ask him because I always think of LinkedIn as just so business to business. Right. the way he talked about it, it sounded like you could use it to reach consumers. Homeowners.

Mark: Sure. You can start each search regionally, search by area, and then you can, reach out. And if, you know, if you’ve identified your target and all that stuff that I’ve talked about, right. You know, if, you know, what’s what’s their occupation, are they lawyers, doctors you search LinkedIn by but occupation. Yeah. And you start connections. Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah. 100.

Victoria: Percent. You know, and really it’s this is a perfect follow up to your book, Lobster and Cheese Plate. You know, when you think about it. So I mean, it all really ties beautifully together.

Mark: You know, I love what he said. I’ve actually I’ve, I’ve been saying that a lot when I, when I do like my website sessions at events and things, one of the things I’ll say, from the SEO perspective, is what he very much said right there, like do a search, but then you go and look at what other people are asking, right?

Mark: And I never took it to that degree. I say, look, those every one of those questions is a blog post title, right? Do it. But he took it a step further. He said, you know, make short, snappy answers to it, make it on an FAQ page and something that a lot of people may not know. especially if you’re on a WordPress site, you can define, the schema of the page.

Mark: So you, you, you create a page type and you can tell basically all the search engines Google, Bing. this is an FAQ page. This is a profile page. This is a contact page. This is, you know, a real estate listing page. And when you define the schema, it helps. That’s the the search engine optimization part. Right. You’re helping Google understand okay, this page is the dedicated FAQ page.

Mark: So it’s going to rank it as such. And it’s going to look there for these types of things. For those quick answers in the right series and stuff. So hey those were some really cool hacks. I love that stuff. Yeah. And the handwriting robot. I mean, come on, I’ve seen it. It’s pretty tight. It’s.

Victoria: Yeah, I’d love to see a sample. It’s really I love it. I like the idea of that. It’s a little folded thing that you said it like a little tent on your desk to show off the artwork. Yeah, I thought that was awesome. I mean, what if our people could do, you know, even the house after or. I don’t know, there’s just all sorts of possibilities out there, but that was a neat idea.

Victoria: So awesome. Another great episode I enjoyed that.

Mark: Maybe I have to start getting on TikTok. yeah.

Victoria: I know me. I’m not a.

Mark: TikToker.

Victoria: Yeah, but I made sense what he was saying.

Mark: Yeah, everything’s been, vertically. I wonder how long before I got to turn my TV on my house on.

Victoria: It’s, Yeah, I hope a long,

Mark: Yeah. Hopefully the movie industry doesn’t stop that. That’s frustrating. That’s right. All right, well, we want to thank Jesse for sharing these cool tips and sharing a little bit about his platform. And we want to thank you for listening week in and week out, I’m Mark Harari.

Victoria: And I’m Victoria Downing. See you next time.