My name is James Price. I run Grindstone Design. I started the company in 2020 when I was a sophomore in college and started doing website design and marketing. From that, it grew into actual growth tactics and doing SEO all the way to now our main focus is going to be CRO and conversion optimization.

I think there’s several things you have to consider. And the first that I prioritize is gonna be understanding the customer, knowing what their pain points are, like where in the buying cycle they are and how you need to talk to them. I think for the first…two years probably, it was just kind of what I think. I wasn’t really doing any content, scraping or customer surveys and like really figuring out like what verbiage are they using? Like how do these people talk? How can I speak to them? So I think that’s going to be the first one. then second is to actually sell them. Like I feel like so many people will run an ad and they’re not even really selling anything.

And even if they are, they’re not persuading anyone in any sort of way. So I think know who you’re talking to and know how to sell them.

As far as the challenges that we’re currently facing right now, it’s it is shifting a little because we are transitioning more to CRO with medium and large scale companies. But with the sales and outreach in our small businesses, it’s educating them on like, your website needs to have more than than three pages if you expect it to actually get traffic. Right. It’s like, hey, we can’t run ads to the home page.

We need to actually make a landing page and run them through there. And I think that’s probably the biggest challenge at the moment right now. So we’ve been creating a ton of training material videos and things like that, just trying to support them.

If I was sitting down talking to someone and giving them advice, I would say to know your customer, but I’ll go a little bit even farther and like a few strategies on how you can find out how they’re talking. One of my favorite ways is to scrape Google reviews, make a little Google forum and for whatever criteria and just send them in there, paste send and put them into a spreadsheet.

And then go back and map it, see what pain points they’re talking about, what delightful features do they have, and just map everything out. And then that verbiage that they’re using, that’s gold. They’re telling you like, this is how we speak, this is what we like, what we don’t like. And I think just by doing that, people can get a really good understanding of who they need to be, or how they need to be talking to those people.

So for us managing ROI, it really comes down to your tech and lifetime gross value. If you can acquire those customers at around like, I say like 3X of that customer acquisition to lifetime gross profit. If it’s at 3X, then you’re probably good.

If your customer acquisition cost is too high, you have a marketing problem. If you’re not making enough money, you have a sales problem. You need to sell more efficiently. What other services can you add on to increase that lifetime value? And I think, that’s kind of what it just comes down to. How can you work out that equation? So, You’re making money, basically.

So you need to track everything through the funnel. And I think so. If you’re getting leads committing and they’re not purchasing, then there’s something nothing wrong with your offer because they’re claiming it, but there’s probably a little bit of friction or just some some additional things that are cluttering up.

What it takes to get them to that final conversion. If you’re getting people to the landing page, but they’re not sending in their information, then you have a problem with the offer. If they’re not making it to the landing page, then you have a problem with your ad. One little thing to think about too is if they are making it to the landing page and they’re not clicking on the offer, check to see if you’re your messaging on the ad is actually matching the landing page. Because if you’re talking about two separate things or two different benefits and they don’t match, then you’ll see a pretty high drop off.

I think the most important piece was what we talked about at the beginning and people knowing who they’re knowing and understanding who they’re talking to. That was the biggest aha moment for me from my shift in perspective. That’s the first thing that really started like making my copy more effective and just driving sales forever. All my clients.

If people want to get in touch with me, they can reach out through our website grindstone design.com or shoot me an email at James at grindstone design.com and I’m also on LinkedIn.