breadcrumb, the grunt test

Summary

first of the new breadcrumb format. quick book lesson, applied. this one’s on Donald Miller’s StoryBrand and the grunt test.

the grunt test is simple. a stranger lands on your homepage. in five seconds, can they answer three questions:

1. what do you offer?
2. how does it make their life better?
3. what do they do next?

if a tired person can’t answer those in five seconds, you have a messaging problem, not a website problem. I sat in Donald Miller’s session at a marketing conference, rebuilt my site against this test, and watched conversion rates move.

but here’s the trap. before you obsess over conversion, ask whether your real bottleneck is traffic or conversion. at PT Biz we had a conversion problem disguised as a traffic problem for a while. once we fixed the messaging, the same traffic produced way more revenue.

diagnose the actual bottleneck first. then run the grunt test. then go optimize.

Transcript

introduction to the episode and the concept of “boring ops”

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Does your marketing pass the grunt test? So this year I told you I wanted to start reviewing some of my favorite books. And today it is building a story brand by Donald Miller. These little podcast episodes that I do, I’m calling breadcrumbs, kind of leave a trail, a story.

So you are able to kind of follow the path and maybe replicate some of the things that I have seen success with, right? So trying to shortcut your path and your journey to these things. This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and I have to start off with a story on this one. So this was years and years ago before Donald Miller was really a household name in the world of story brand.

He’s got a bunch of different brands that he’s working on now, but I was at a marketing conference and he gave a talk. And it was, it was before he had published the book. I mean, it was really before any of these things. He had the business, but he didn’t have the book or anything yet. And I think he was kind of refining that message, getting it ready because he wanted to turn it into a book.

And I’ll never forget he, you know, this is towards the beginning of the conference. He’s talking and another weird thing about this conference is it’s, you could go anywhere you wanted. It was like choose your own adventure when you’re listening to the speakers, which was cool and not cool at the same time because sometimes like you might have two people that you wanted to listen to at the same time.

So you’d like have to miss one to go catch another. And that’s the part that I hated. But I chose to go hear Donald Miller because he was talking about optimizing your website and your marketing, you know, through simplicity, which just really like struck a chord with me and I was like, yeah, let’s, let’s go listen to that.

my personal story of applying Miller’s principles

And I listened to his entire speech. I took pages and pages of notes and then I basically blew off the rest of the marketing conference and I sat in my hotel room for two days and optimized my website based off of the things that he said because I felt that it was so important. I felt that it was like the one thing that I could do because I was getting good web traffic with my conversion was not good.

And so I was like, Oh yeah, I got to fix it. This is the biggest problem right now. If I don’t do anything else from this conference, like this would be the most important thing. And I did that. I blew off the rest of the marketing conference, listen to this one, you know, talk from, from Donald Miller and then I implemented everything and it changed the conversion in a pretty significant way and really helped garage gym athlete grow at the beginning.

So definitely a breadcrumb I want to leave for anyone out there listening and I’m going to read a short excerpt from the book. So ultimately what I think you should do is go buy the book, build building a story brand by Donald Miller and I’m going to read this short ex excerpt and it says, does your marketing pass the grunt test?

identifying and addressing the specific operational challenges in your business

Just like there are three questions audience audiences must be able to answer to engage in a story. There are three questions potential customers must answer if we expect them to engage with our brand and they should be able to answer these questions within five, seven, five seconds of looking at our website or marketing material.

And the three questions are, what do you offer? How will it make my life better? What do I need to do to buy? At story brand we call this passing the grunt test. The critical question is this, could a caveman look at your website and immediately grunt what you offer? Imagine a guy wearing a bear skin t-shirt sitting in a cave by a fire with a laptop across his lap.

He’s looking at your website. Would he be able to grunt an answer to the three questions posed above? If you are an aspirin company, would be able to grunt, you sell headache medicine, me feel better fast, me get it at Walgreens. If not, you’re likely losing sales. Now there’s a lot of great information in this book, so I highly recommend going to grab a copy.

the PT biz example: prioritizing traffic over complex website features

I obviously don’t get any kickbacks from selling other people’s books, but hey, that’s not the only reason I’m here, right? I want to share these stories to help you, but here’s what I’ve seen over the years. I’ve helped a lot of people through this. Following an easy framework on your website is incredibly important, but there’s two things that you have to know.

If you don’t have traffic to your website, too much time spent optimizing your site is going to be a waste of time, okay? Your problem is fixed web traffic, so you can get ads to get increased web traffic. You can do more on social media and try and direct people to your website. You can do search engine optimization to try and get people to your website.

There are a whole host of things that you can do to try and get people to your website, but ultimately if you have no traffic, it doesn’t matter how beautiful or how clear your website is. You have a traffic problem. Once you have people coming to your website, you might have a conversion problem. That’s where this comes in.

the importance of continuous improvement in business operations

You could do it ahead of time if you want. Just don’t think if you have low web traffic that you need to just go all in on a clearer marketing message. You need to have the clear marketing message, go through some of these steps and exercises, but then you need to go get more web traffic, more eyeballs on your marketing material essentially.

Know which problem you have. Like I said, I’ve helped a lot of people. Some people are thinking, okay, I’m going to spend this quarter making my website better. It’s a complete waste of three months of your life because all you need to do is get it to a reasonable level and then you can worry about traffic.

Another story that comes to mind with this that just brings the point home is when I first partnered with Danny and Eve over at PT Biz, I was kind of the online digital business guy. They did not have a lot of experience in the space. They had been running brick and mortar practices and the whole reason I even came on board and we partnered together was because of my online digital marketing experience that I had built up over many years before partnering with them.

closing thoughts on the value of mastering the basics in business

They were like, okay, we need a website. I was like, we don’t really need a website. We need a one-page funnel. We don’t need a website with all these things and I’m like, nah, we don’t really need it. That was counterintuitive to what everyone thought. We honestly had this one-page website that there was no about us.

There was nothing that you could do on this page when we first started PT Biz except for we capture your contact information so you can contact us. It was almost like a fight club of sorts, but I had sat around and analyzed everything and I was like, we have a great offer. We have a pretty good product.

Our product and service is light years ahead of where we started, but it was good. It was getting people results at the time. We have a good product, good service. We’re getting people good outcomes, but we just need more people. That’s what we need right now. We just need more people. I knew, and my time was limited too when I first started working with PT Biz.

We didn’t know if it was going to work, just like any business you start. We didn’t know if this was going to be a massive opportunity or what. We just didn’t know. I was so focused 95% of my time on Garage Gym Athlete and 5% of my time over at PT Biz when things first kicked off and I’m like, okay, I need to be incredibly efficient here.

What’s the best use of my time? They’re thinking, hey, we’ll build a website. I’m like, mm, because we didn’t have money to hire that out or anything, so I was like, I’m not going to spend my couple of hours per week trying to grow this business focused on creating a website, because that takes a lot of time, effort, and energy.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the traffic problem. I’m going to focus on getting us more eyeballs. I focused on that for a while, and then once that started to get bigger and bigger and bigger, that’s when we reverted and decided to have a better website and focus on those things. You go through iterations of these things.

There’s always a version two of the website, version three, version four. You can always get better, but ultimately, that’s what I focused on and what grew. First thing I want to tell you, just having worked with a lot of people and having done this myself, know which problem you’re trying to solve.

Have a clear marketing message, but don’t spend a lot of time, effort, and money on a new website, because that’s sometimes what people think. When you don’t have a website conversion problem, you just have a traffic problem. If you have the traffic problem, that’s when you dive into SEO, paid ads, or social media.

Those are the top three ways that you’re going to get more traffic to your website. Then after you feel like those are dialed in and they’re increasing, then you can focus on, okay, let’s have the badass website that does all this, captures leads, converts sales, and then focus on conversion rate optimization from there.

Either way, great opportunity for you. Great book, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. Definitely a book I highly recommend to any entrepreneur, but with the caveats I’ve listed out over the last nine, 10 minutes of this episode is like, yes, it is an amazing book. Yes, go optimize your marketing material and your website, but make sure you know which problem you’re solving and solve it in the correct order.

All right, try harder.