112: Build an Online Presence and Connect with Your Ideal Customer with Ajay Prasad

Robert Plank: Ajay Prasad is formerly a marketer for a few Fortune 10 companies and he now owns GMR Web Team, GMR Transcription, and his brand new business, RepuGen. Ajay has focused his career on helping SMB's maximize revenue and reach through the internet. Ajay, I'm Robert. Nice to meet you.

Ajay Prasad: Very nice to meet you, Robert. I'm happy to be here.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I'm happy, too. What I want to know is, what is it that you do and how are you different from everyone else out there?

Ajay Prasad: What we do is essentially we help small- and medium-size businesses maximize their sales from the internet. A lot of the business is now coming from the internet, so that's what we do. We are different from your typical digital marketing agency is, number one, we are a full service agency. We have all the pieces in one place. We are not a one-trick pony. We are very strategy-focused. We judge yourself based on what kind of return we are bringing for our clients.

For our client, it doesn't take them to ... We don't do all these mumbo jumbo about ranking and where you are. We just look at it, say, "What kind of money you are making from the internet or how many views you are getting?" Then, we see if we can improve it. We come up with a plan, we tell them what the budget will be, and if they are struck with us, that means they are happy, they are getting a positive return on investment. We don't lose too many clients, which tells me we must be doing something right.

Robert Plank: That tells you you are providing good service, right?

Ajay Prasad: Yes.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and I like that because I don't work with a ton of small businesses. I work with a few, and what I always hear a lot is that, for example, I see that you guys work with dentists and urgent care doctors and things like that. What I hear from some of these doctors, the dentists especially and the chiropractors especially, is that they get these robocalls all day long from these kind of, like you said, the other one-trick pony kind of agencies. All they do is say, "Do you want to have a better Yelp review?" I'm thinking, okay, a Yelp review is nice but what about the rest of it? What about a website, social media, stuff like that?

Ajay Prasad: Yes. That is where we always tell them that one thing is not going to do anything for you. These days, now, to get business from the internet, of course you have to be found. You need to be found. Then, you need to have a really stellar reputation online, where the Yelp review comes in definitely, and the other things, and once you have these, then of course you have to be able to convert. That's what it takes for someone to contact you. After that, your service comes in. Really, most of the small businesses ... I always say that if the majority of business is coming from new customers, then you need to look inside and see what you are doing wrong, because the majority of customers should be getting really from referrals, especially for small businesses.

As you do a good job ... Everything needs to be a peace offering. You cannot just say, "I'll get you this. I'll get you that." Unless you look at all the pieces of business together, it will not work. Because my experience is with larger companies, where we always knew that the operations is as important as marketing, and finance is as important as operations and marketing. We become more of a consultant to our client, not just bring them customers.

In face, today I'm meeting with one of my clients where it looks like we are not getting the positive return on our investment in four months. That's the discussion we are going to have, is go over the numbers, really look at the metrics to see if it is making sense. One of the things that are not making sense for me is the value of sales.

Until we understand, until the company understands, what's the value of sales, how do you know if your marketing is effective or not? We get to that level. You cannot just take one piece and do it. You cannot say, don't do paid advertising. Everything has a place, and the reason people say, "You don't do it," is because they don't know generally speaking.

What we do is we say, "Given your business, what should be the right strategy for marketing?" We tell them. Of course, there are businesses where we say, "You know what? Social media is not very critical for you." Which is very rare nowadays, obviously. There are businesses we say, "Don't even worry about SEO, because it's so comparative, all the element keywords. It will take forever, so let's figure out how to do better advertising and get a positive return on investment for you."

Again, marketing has to be customized. Every business is very unique. That's what we always say. Our campaign needs to be consistent with the business.

Robert Plank: I like that. It seems like from what you just said is there's a couple of levels to it. You could say the worst, most basic level, would be, like you said, the one-trick ponies. All they want to do is just show, "Well, look, you can rank high for this keyword." The next step up is some kind of an agency that they do everything. It seems like the next level about that is that they do everything, but they look at what's already there, and they look at what's worth doing, and they look at the competition, and they say, "Even though we could do these ten or twenty things, maybe we'll just do five."

It sounds like the next level even above that, it sounds like where you're at, is you do all that, but also once the ball is rolling, then you'll course correct. You don't set up the website and then say, "Have fun," and walk away. You actually, like you said, "The leads aren't coming in," or, "There's not enough repeat customers," so now you go and fix things over time.

Ajay Prasad: Correct, correct. I've always said that web is no different from brick and mortar. It's not like you set up a store, and you put a sign in it and everything, and you are done. You have to keep on improving. You have to tweak the product that you are selling. You need to be trying different kinds of marketing campaigns to maximize it. This is no different. For example, we are a Google Premier Partner. All it means is, we have jumped through many hoops and Google recognizes us as experts in Google AdWords.

For all of our clients ... We manage over a million dollars right now for our clients' budget, and we are checking it three or four times a day to see, what's the trend, what's working. These are not the kind of thing that you set it up and you are done. You have to keep on looking. You have to keep on improving. That's all marketing.

When I was in corporate America, for big companies, it's not like we had a campaign, say TV advertising, and it was successful, so we said, okay, it's done. No, we just had to keep on doing the same advertising, right?

Robert Plank: Right. If it worked, why not repeat it or even try to make it better, right?

Ajay Prasad: Exactly. At some point, any advertising, you'll see that there is a life cycle. After some point, it starts to become less and less effective. Then you have to go and change it. Even the large corporations, like Coca-Cola and all, you will see that their team keeps on changing, right? That's what marketing is all about. If you see the business is declining, you have to make some changes to keep that momentum going.

Robert Plank: Yeah. Imagine if every year for the Superbowl you'd see the exact same commercials. That's no fun.

Ajay Prasad: That's exactly my point.

Robert Plank: Cool. Could you give me a good example of some business that you came across where they maybe had a lot of missed opportunities and then you went in and you worked your magic, and you made their business super awesome?

Ajay Prasad: Yes. Since you talked about Urgent Care ... By the way, we have many, many clients. A few very large companies are our client. When I am saying large, I am saying a couple of hundred million dollars. The largest one would probably be a couple of billion dollars. We have a lot of these small businesses that are struggling. Urgent care is a very good example. This urgent care center came to us for marketing. This was about a year and a half back.

Basically, they were very honest, and they said, "Listen. Our sales have been dropping, and now we earning a loss, and if in six months we can not turn it around, we have to close it." Their lease was running out so they said, "We are not going to renew the lease if we can't become profitable." We did analysis, and we could see that there were a lot of searches, that people are searching. That is true. Urgent care is one thing that you can even afford not to do digital marketing.

That's the first thing people do is go on the internet when they have a cut or an injury. They're looking for urgent care. We saw that there were a lot of searches for them. Of course, their website was outdated. They were not getting found there. Other thing that popped up was that their Yelp rating was 1.2. There were seven reviews. Just seven. The last one was one year old, but if you just went on their Yelp and you saw 1.2 rating.

My first question was, "Is this the correct number? If this is correct, I don't think I can do anything. I can get people to come to your website with my activity, but after that they will not come to you because who wants to go to a place where everyone is saying it's horrible?"

Robert Plank: Right.

Ajay Prasad: Of course, the owner got really upset with me. She was like, "What do you mean? We have been there for twenty-five years. We have all these loyal customers." I said, "Yeah. Someone who does not know you, how would they know?" What we did is, of course we redid the website. That was a simple thing. Because this is local marketing, it becomes really easy.

We started with some ... We did both a CO and some paid advertising, so quickly start getting people on their website. Then we instituted a program, ongoing program to improve their reputation. What happens, people do not medically write reviews just because they had a great experience. The people who had bad experience are more likely to write a review because they are pissed off.

We created a manual process, which later on I automated, which became RepuGen. We created a process for them where we printed a card and the front desk was to ask everyone when they are leaving, "How was your experience?" If they said, "Very good," or in their judgement, they were happy, then give them a card. Request them to write a review. Literally, fast forward three months, their review was 3.0.

They were already in black, the whole operation. Now one year down the road, their number of patient count has doubled. Half of the patient is now coming from internet, which was not even there before. They have a hundred plus reviews. Their average is over 4.0, because our process is such that if you are unhappy, then we just ask you, "What happened?" Then we say, "We will contact you," and someone contacts that if you are unhappy. If you are happy, then we ask you to write a review. As simple as that.

Now, one year later, they are super profitable. Obviously, they went and they renewed their lease for another ten years and it's a huge success story. This was a chain, so they had two other urgent care centers. They had similar problem. Not as bad as this one, so of course now we are doing all three of them and it's a very profitable operation. This gives you a very good example how literally in three months, a business which was contemplating closing turned around and became a very successful operation. Right now, that is probably one of the most profitable urgent care center in the city.

Robert Plank: Awesome. That's cool that in just a few months, it seems like before, they were probably working really hard and missing out on a lot of things, and now, just because you were able to plug in just a handful of strategies, now it turned the whole thing around.

Ajay Prasad: The interesting thing is, for example, putting this reputation development process, they also started to get feedback from the customer who were not happy, right? If the customer is not happy, they tell you what happened. When we automated the system, the RepuGen, that's what it does. Now that when people are not happy, you find out, so you also improve your operation. They learn a lot of thing from our system that they also made changed in their operation that made them even stronger.

Robert Plank: I like that. It's not just a matter of following up with the happy customers to balance out the bad reviews with some good ones, but it's also if you keep getting all the reviews saying that, like, "The place isn't clean enough," or "The secretary's mean," or something, or "They don't follow up enough," they can correct that.

Ajay Prasad: In fact, the funny thing is that there was that problem. They had to fire one of the front desk person because she was mean. In fact, everyone complained about, so they just simply went and changed that. That made a big difference in their happiness.

Robert Plank: That's cool, because that's one of those things that, just a few years ago, before all of this stuff, they might not have even known. It might've been for the past twenty years this was their problem. Right?

Ajay Prasad: Correct, correct, correct. The people were thrilled with their doctors. The front desk was the problem

Robert Plank: Such an easy thing to fix, right?

Ajay Prasad: Yeah. Exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. I really like stuff like that. For example, I really like that, like when there's a house for sale near me, they almost all have a website, now, on the actual sign. It's usually 123MainStreet.com. It's what's printed right on the sign. Super easy to get to. It seems like the dentists seem to be the most savvy, I guess, with this kind of thing.

I really like ... When I was a kid what was cool about the dentist was they would have you write yourself a postcard for six months from now. You totally forget that you sent that, but six months later, a thing comes in the postcard, and you recognize your own handwriting, and I'm sure that was just part of the process to get customers back.

I like that now that there's all this technology, the dentist I go to now, what I do is I have my appointment. Again, from six months ago, I forget that there's an appointment coming up and then I think that a system sends me a text message, and that emails me, and even the email itself says either I can click a link to reschedule, I can click a link to say I agree with the appointment time, do not contact me again, or I can say I agree but also email me again the day before. I love that. I wish more businesses would do that.

Ajay Prasad: Yeah. Exactly right. Either, for attention you want to do that, and then of course, for every dentist, you have to have a stellar review online. Otherwise, again, if I see 1.2 rating not just on Yelp, but on other review sites, or you have Vitals, and all those medical-related site, and if I go there, and someone is saying, "And I went there and I came out with a bloody mouth," guess what? You are not going. It is so important to have a stellar review now to get new customers. Your typical process now is when people find you, they go and find about you before they contact you.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah, and that's so true about any kind of dentist or doctor kind of thing. The reviews are so huge because if there's a Wal-Mart, or a Target, or a Taco Bell nearby that has two stars, fine, I'll still go there, but if there's a doctor who's three stars, I don't trust that.

Ajay Prasad: Every local business. That's what I said. The chains is a different story, just like you said. Every local business needs to have a very stellar online reputation. There's no way around it. For medical professionals, it's even critical. I know some hospitals which has horrible ratings, so I don't even know how people go there.

Robert Plank: They have no choice. It's what's nearby, I guess, right?

Ajay Prasad: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I really like what that kind of leads us to, because always the fear, right? Everyone's fear is that if they have a mom and pop business or something with only ten employees, and then the big retail chain comes to town ... Maybe they own a deli or an Italian restaurant, and then Olive Garden come to town, or a Subway comes to town, everyone's always worried that the big franchise is going to push me out. It sounds like, with this online stuff, with the social media, with the reviews, the big chains don't really do that. This is how everyone can get ahead.

Ajay Prasad: Exactly. You are a hundred percent there. That's why I always say that regional marketing is so critical for small businesses. You can really have your customer loyalty and keep on making improvement, and not losing your existing customer, and then keep on adding new customers. It is totally irrelevant if you have competition.

I always tell my clients that, "Listen. The competition, worry about it but first thing you have to worry about is internity. If you are doing everything right, you can go against any company. I don't care how big they are." Again, it's the local and even individuals ... I work for a restaurant chain. One of my jobs was, I was VP of strategy for a big restaurant chain. It's a billion dollar corporation. I know that the customers have an affinity for local ... If they had their own preference, they would go to that local mom and pop restaurant instead of this chain. That's the first inclination. You can build your customer relationship.

When you go to a new place, then obviously review is how they will go. If I don't have a way to check review of a restaurant, then I will end up going to a chain because I know what to expect.

Robert Plank: Right. The chain is the default decision. If you can't decide, you just go to the chain.

I don't want to keep you too long and as we're winding this down, could you tell us as far as all the business that you helped and worked on, what's the number one mistake you see them all making?

Ajay Prasad: I think that the number one mistake that they all make is that they are way too focused on outside instead of looking inside. Every business needs to understand why they are in business, why they are different from their competition. Small businesses, generally speaking, don't do that, which is the biggest mistake. I have always said that if you are a small business, you need to know why.

If someone has been in business for twenty-five years, like this urgent care, it's easy, right? You can talk about how we have been serving the locality for twenty-five years. If you are an accountant, whatever you are, why? One of the things that will happen is, if you look internally, then you will start to focus on who your ideal customer is. Small business have a tendency to take any customer. I made that mistake, frankly, when I started my own business, is to go and, "I'll take any customer," then later on I was spending way too much time on the wrong customers.

Every small business has to figure out who their ideal customer is. Once you have that figured out, who your ideal customer is, then you start to focus on getting those customers, because that is the only way you will grow, you will keep customers. You need me to know who that is and very few businesses I run into have that.

The two biggest mistake that they tend to focus too much on, "Oh, so-and-so is doing this. So-and-so is doing that. Oh, they have this happen." I always say that what you do has going to be the biggest impact on your business rather than what happens outside.

Robert Plank: The other thing about that is it seems like that anyone who's in the business, if someone owns a restaurant or owns an urgent care, a lot of times it seems like they're too close to it and they need someone like you to look at their business from the outside, from a regular person's perspective, to figure out their weaknesses and figure out their strengths that they should be doing more of.

Ajay Prasad: Yeah. It's even just asking questions. I can tell you that many business owners, when I start asking them questions, it just makes them think, and like, "Wow, okay." That's the thing. The small businesses really are so busy surviving that they are always working on the business. They are in the business, not on the business. You need to take some time off so that you can work on the business so that you can see what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and make adjustments.

It is very hard, but getting an outside company like us, it's very automatic for us, right? We start asking, "Okay, how do you differentiate yourself? What is the problem?" Just like we did with urgent care. It never occurred to them that no one will, even if someone referred ... I told them that, "Listen. When people even refer and they say go to that urgent care, they are going to check you up on the internet. They see your review and they are not going to come.

It never even occurred to them that not having a plan to get ongoing reviews is hurting their business. That's the only thing. You have to be looking at what is working, what's not working. Like I said, if you had this internal focus, number one, to see where you can make improvement ... I always say, you will seldom make home-runs. All you have to do is hit regular singles and doubles and you will see that you are winning. Then, of course, every business should know who is their ideal customer. That will really help them focus their marketing.

Robert Plank: Two really good pieces of advice. Focus inside and then differentiate and get your ideal customer. I really like everything you had to say, and I want to send people your way. Can you let everyone know, Ajay, where can people find out more about you, and what it is you do, and maybe even hire you?

Ajay Prasad: Sure. There are two websites that they should check. My digital agency marketing website is GMRWebTeam.com. It's just like it sounds. GMR is Gloria Mary Rachel, and it's web as in website, and team is in football team that you have, dot com. That will give you an idea of our approach even to digital marketing. The other one that we have created, like a software service for generating ongoing reviews, which also helps you see what your customer, if there are any flaws, is called RepuGen.

This is a software that essentially automates the whole manual process that I had created for our businesses to generate more reviews and get the feedback. The reason I created software, frankly, was the execution level was so spotty. Some of my clients did an excellent job of manually doing it, some of them not so excellent, not very good. This software just takes the fright out of asking people how happy you are or getting any feedback. The system does everything, and now you can just contact customers who are unhappy to address their issue. These two sites, I will say that they should go and check me out.

Robert Plank: Awesome. The GMR Web Team looks like a great website, a great service, and the RepuGen looks like a great software as a service. I'm really glad that you came on the show, Ajay, and I'm really happy that you shared the things you did. I was really impressed. Learned a lot so thanks for coming on.