Offline Marketing

Robert Plank: Doren Aldana is the CEO and President of MortgageMarketingCoach.com and the Founder of My Testimonial Engine, the number one software for helping service-based local businesses collect and share client reviews on autopilot. As a result of his clients' extraordinary success, he has won the prestigious Best Industry Service Provider Award three years in a row. That's pretty cool. Welcome to the show, Doren.

Doren Aldana: Hey, thanks so much for having me man. Appreciate it.

Robert Plank: I'm glad you're hear. Could you tell us about what it is that you do and what makes you stand out, what makes you different and special?

Doren Aldana: Yeah man. I'm a father of four, the fab four. I'm a husband. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got a couple of businesses. One we provide marketing solutions to mortgage professionals at MortgageMarketingCoach.com. Another, which I think we'll be drilling down into deeper, is the Testimonial Engine. It's a software by service and we help business owners, generally service-based business owners, but business owners in general attract more five-star rave views from their happy clients and to get them on review sites like Google Plus, Yelp, Facebook. You name it, we cover it. That almost keeps me out of trouble between the two businesses.

Robert Plank: Nice. Just enough to stay busy.

Doren Aldana: That's right.

Robert Plank: With this Testimonial Engine, how does it work? What's it all about?

Doren Aldana: It's all about the big problem that a lot of business owners are either consciously aware of or subconsciously aware of. That is it's generally a pain in the ass to get reviews from their happy clients. It's cumbersome. It's time consuming. They might send out an email and rarely will they get a response. They might chase them around with phone calls or send out something in the mail asking them to send it back, postage paid. Generally speaking, it's really not an easy feat to get clients, customers to submit reviews. We make that easy, breezy, lemon squeezy by putting the whole thing on autopilot. Essentially it's as easy as uploading their name, email, phone number, etc. into our system and then just set it and forget it.

The system does all the heavy lifting for them. It asks them for the review. It asks them to copy and paste that review onto other review sites that they want to build a reputation on. It just makes it much more expedient for the business owner to get positive reviews and to get those reviews on review sites as well as share them on social media, like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter so all their fans and followers are seeing all these awesome rave reviews from their happy clients in the news feed. Of course, that's just another way to build their brilliant brand and to position themselves as the only logical choice, building their business at the speed of trust. Does that answer you question, Robert?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It answers and it kind of gets me off on a whole cool, fun direction, which is you mention in there that okay, getting reviews and stuff like that for any business is kind of a hassle, kind of cumbersome, kind of time consuming. A lot of people don't do it. How does your system get this done when just normally emailing them doesn't work?

Doren Aldana: Generally speaking, when you just send out an email asking them to submit a review on Google or whatever platform you happen to be using, if it's a review site like Google or Yelp or any other review site, Facebook, if the client does not have an account for that platform, generally they're not going to submit a review because in order for them to submit a review, they're going to need an account. You're going to alienate a big chunk of your database, your clientele, if you're doing that because there's always going to be a certain chunk of your database that doesn't use that platform and doesn't have an account for that platform. Generally speaking, the people who have the highest net worth, the people that are a little more seasoned in life, they tend not to be as active on social media and have accounts for these sorts of things. It's going to dramatically suppress response if you're going for the jugular and asking for a review directly on these platforms, one by one, or directly to one in particular.

Rather than doing that, the Testimonial Engine makes it way easier for your clients to submit a review because they don't need an account. It's just as simple as sending them an email, saying hey, thanks so much for your visiting or thanks so much for choosing Acme International, whatever your company name is. We'd be delighted if you could take a brief moment to submit a review. Let us know how we did. It only takes like 30 seconds. It would mean the world to us. It's really simple in your request. You can do this by text message as well right to their mobile phone. When they click the link in either context, it's going to send them to a place that allows them to submit a review without needing an account. That allows you to get a higher response because everyone is a position to submit a review and that means more positive reviews for your company, more trust being built in terms of your reputation.

Then after the review is captured, Robert, that's where we want to ask them to post that review onto the strategic review sites that you and your company want to build strategically online. There are a ton of them up there, but generally speaking, it's the Google, the Facebook, the Yelps and those sorts of platforms that help more prospective clientele find out about you and positions you as the only logical choice. That's kind of the secret sauce to getting more reviews and milking them for all they're worth, is being able to get more reviews by not requiring an account, and then asking them to share the love and share the news by posting them on strategic review sites. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Well it makes sense and I'm kind of trying to picture this. Am I getting this right in that it's almost like a two-step process? They get an email and you ask how did we do. They click the link. They fill in the survey, but they don't have any other way of going on to Yelp or Facebook or Google until after they've filled that in. Is that right?

Doren Aldana: Bingo. On the thank you page, if it's indeed, that's where we're going to ask them to copy and paste it onto Google or Facebook or Yelp or whatever it happens to be. Usually three or four options, not ten or twenty because a confused mind generally says no, but if it's a negative review, we don't want to ask them to do that because it's going to corrode and tarnish your reputation online. It's almost impossible to remove the blemish once it's added.

We have a slick little system where if it's a negative review, three stars or below, it sends them to a damage control page where we're empathizing with them, saying sorry things didn't go as planned, or sorry you had a bad experience. If you'd be so kind as to share what went wrong and how we can fix it, we'll rectify this as soon as possible. When they submit that review or that feedback, it's 100% quarantined. It's 100% confidential and private, so it acts like a firewall. That negativity doesn't spew onto the web and corrode your reputation for years to come. It's quarantined and that way, you can do damage control, be all over it like white on rice, and hopefully turn them around.

Studies show that seven out of ten consumers will do business with a business again if their complaint is resolved quickly. Speed is the name of the game and that's why our system notifies you instantaneously in real time when any feedback comes through, whether it's positive and/or negative, so that you can stay abreast as to what's going on with your business in real time and hopefully turn them around if there's any negativity or any complaints coming through. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah. That's pretty cool, that last thing you mentioned there where they get notified for a good or bad review, because someone can go and make a quick phone call, send out a quick post card, something cool like that.

Doren Aldana: Yeah, exactly. It always feels great. You gotta know when you're getting loads and loads of positive reviews and positive feedback coming through in your inbox or on your mobile device. You know you're feeling great. It's affirmation, it's confirmation. You're glowing from ear to ear, grinning from ear to ear, knowing you're doing a great job because all this praise is coming through. That gives you a little more pep in your step, a little more sparkle in your eye, a little bit more sense of your own purpose and on point. You're making a difference.

If it's negative, then you feel good that at least you're being able to rectify quickly and it's not just happening under the ground in the invisible realm, brewing and eventually, in many cases, when you allow it to brew like that, it spews out onto the web and that's after the fact. You can't do anything to rectify it because it's already on these review sites. Once they get on there, it's virtually impossible to remove it. This is a really important piece of the puzzle that most people aren't aware of.

Robert Plank: The way that you were explaining that, as you were in the middle of explaining it, my first thought was like oh no, this is kind of shady, but then once you finish your thought, it actually made sense where if someone wants to leave a good review, four stars, five stars, great. Let them do that, but if they have three stars or below, you stop them and try to fix it. At first thought, I was thinking oh man, that's almost kind of shifty, but the more I think about it, it's like well, if someone leaves a bad review, they usually had a problem and they want something fixed. Like you said too, it's really tough to go back and try to hunt that person down, if they a one star Yelp review, to try to get them to fix it. All these review platforms, to my understanding, don't like you to bribe someone to leave a better review. It seems like this catches the problem before it becomes a problem.

Doren Aldana: Well exactly. If you're really committed to excellence, you obviously will do whatever it takes to turn the client around and turn them from unsatisfied to satisfied, or at least satiated to the point where they feel like you did the best job possible to turn the situation around. You'll do that regardless of what kind of incentive, monetary or otherwise, you get because that's just who you are. That's what you're committed to. That's how you show up, but to be able to have that buffer where you're not having to deal with all the negativity that's now irreversible and irrevocable is huge because now you're able to turn the people around.

You don't have to worry about all the crap they spewed onto the world wide web that people are reading for years to come. Even though you rectified it, they may not know about that because in many cases, they're not able to see that you rectified it. That's just how these review sites are set up. It's kind of locked in stone in many cases. It's a really important buffer that's mission critical if you want to manage your online reputation and maximize your perception in the eyes of prospective clients and customers. The beautiful thing is the whole thing runs on autopilot so you don't have to sweat it. You just focus on what you do best, meeting with clients, cashing checks, or whatever it happens to be, and you get the best to do all the rest. That's what I'm all about, is helping people focus on their brilliance instead of dealing with all the minutiae. You with me?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Get to the exciting stuff.

Doren Aldana: Exactly.

Robert Plank: Why did you make this? Was this a kind of situation where you didn't see anything like this existed? Or maybe did you try some alternatives or did you need it for yourself? How did this come to be?

Doren Aldana: As I mentioned earlier, I've been working with mortgage professionals for quite some time. I started out being a general life coach, and then started to study marketing because I realized if I don't learn this marketing thing, I'm going to have skinny kids. I started to become a piranha for information on marketing and really honing my skills as a marketer. Then a client did really well with me in the mortgage space and he said dude, you should share the love with other people in the mortgage space because they could really use your help. That was way back in 2004 and I've been growing and going ever since, just specialize as a mortgage marketing consultant and providing all kinds of done-for-you solutions inside of that business.

Along the journey, this thing about testimonials just kept coming up. It was kind of the perennial topic that seemed to have relevance and mission-critical mass appeal for a lot of my clients. They were just thinking I need more testimonials but it's so dang hard to get them. We kept being confronted with the challenge of it. When I saw the opportunity to partner with my business partner and launch the Testimonial Engine, I was like man, this is just a hand-in-glove opportunity. I know that it's becoming more and more important with Google's algorithm now for local search becoming inextricably linked with the reviews, not just quality but also quantity, and being that I was working with people who are in the local space, mortgage professionals, it was just intuitively a yes for me. I knew this is the next big thing, so I pounced on it.

Robert Plank: Cool. What's awesome about this is that you built it for the, you started in the mortgage space and this works well in the mortgage space, but this works in any business. I guess if your business has zero customers, this doesn't apply, but if your business has one customer or more, then this is a useful tool.

Doren Aldana: Yeah. The other really slick thing is if you just want to get more reviews and have them on your website, not have to mess around trying to copy and paste them every time you get them or send them to your webmaster and go through the hassle of trying to get every single one of them manually transferred onto your website, you're going to love something like the Testimonial Engine because once you have your account set up and you get reviews, any positive reviews, which generally is four stars or above, will auto-feed right on your website. You just add a little bit of code on the site and it auto-feeds all your most recent positive reviews in real time right on your site. No extra headaches or hassle. It's just literally as I said before. Set if and forget it.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool because that way, like you said, you don't have to hunt around five different sites to have all those reviews. You have it on a site where you can control it.

Doren Aldana: Bingo. You can also, any review you don't like, even if it shows up positive, if you just don't like how they wrote it or how they framed it, you can just go into your dashboard and press the suppress button. You can suppress it so it doesn't show up on your website. It's super easy to modify these too. The only thing you can't really suppress is when they hit your Google or your Yelp or those review sites because they control it. You don't control those review sites. They do, and that's why you need an account to submit a review on those sites. You get to control everything on the Testimonial Engine side, and that's why it's so important to make sure all the most positive stuff spills over onto the review sites so that you've only got glowing rave reviews that you're proud of on those platforms instead of stuff that tarnishes your reputation that you're not so proud of.

Robert Plank: Right. You said that you used this in the mortgage area. Can you tell us about someone's business you helped, either in the mortgage area or outside of mortgages, where they had a real problem with reviews, either bad ones or not getting enough, and then they used My Testimonial Engine to get a bunch more good reviews?

Doren Aldana: Absolutely. I got a hunting buddy here in Kamloops. I'm in BC, beautiful British Columbia, Canada. I'm in a very redneck town and one of the big things we love to do out here is hunt. I got a hunting buddy who has a spa. He's got 17 technicians working for him. He went from a franchise to being independent. Needless to say he had to start from scratch with his brand. He was virtually unfound on the web. He had zero presence whatsoever. We're starting him from scratch, from ground zero. I helped him set up his Yelp account and his Testimonial Engine account and his Google My Business account and all that good stuff. We uploaded his list of past clients. Then we did some ninja tactics to follow up with the people who weren't responding with some additional emails.

Within I think it was two months, he went from the bowels of cyberspace where no one could even find him, even if they wanted to, to being number one on Google for the three pack, which is fancy terminology for the top three listings in the local search where you have the flag on the map. I don't know if you've noticed that but they show up in threes in the top listing. He's number one in the three pack with more reviews than all of his competitors combined, plus he's also got his website because it's optimized with his positive reviews and his positive reviews are linked with those websites. His website is number one for organic search for his target keywords as well. We did all that within two months.

Robert Plank: Just by using that tool and by using some of those simple strategies?

Doren Aldana: Setting up the review sites, getting a whole whack of positive reviews on those review sites, and building up his digital presence with more reviews than any of his competitors. That was 98% of it right there.

Robert Plank: What are his competitors and what are a lot of people out there doing incorrectly with their reviews on their sites, aside from not using My Testimonial Engine?

Doren Aldana: This guy's competitors are like, the keywords are like Kamloops day spa, Kamloops manicure, pedicure, that kind of stuff. Frankly, his competitors for the most part just are clueless how important reviews are. Chances are they don't have a system. The keyword there is system, which stands for save yourself time, energy, and money. They don't have a system for getting reviews and getting maximum quantity and quality of reviews. That's really what the game changer was for my buddy, is we plugged him into the Testimonial Engine and he just roared past his competitors in short order and left them in the dust.

It wasn't really that he was any better, per se, although he would tell you, his unbiased opinion right? He would tell you he's better, but frankly, the game changer was not that he was necessarily any better. It was just that he knew how to take all that latent praise in his database and convert it into real, glowing rave reviews on the web. He didn't necessarily know how to do it. He just knew someone who did. That would be yours truly, and we did all the heavy lifting for him. It's about leveraging strengths. It's about leveraging technology. It's about leveraging his database and turning his database into a flood of rave reviews, and then positioning those in the right strategic places so that he can actually start getting more clients from it.

Robert Plank: Does your system have the ability for someone to dump in their whole database and is there a way for, for example, if you send out an email for someone to leave a review and they don't, does it have any kind of follow up?

Doren Aldana: Yeah. There's automated follow up if they don't respond. Then there's also the ability to send freestanding broadcast emails to people, either one-on-one or group via email using the Testimonial Engine. You could do additional follow ups beyond the automated. I think the automated just does two or three follow ups, depending on how you toggle it. You can send additional broadcast emails to the hard eggs to crack, you know the people who are just not responding for whatever reason. Then what was the other question you had? Sorry, you asked me two questions and one, and I forgot the other one.

Robert Plank: No sweat. The first question was can they import their whole database in there.

Doren Aldana: Right, yeah, yeah. For sure. They could do it onesies and twosies, so you can do them manually one at a time, or if you have a list, if you have a CRM and you're exporting from your CRM, you can just do a csv export. All we need is your client's name and email, or if you're using the SMS funnel and asking for reviews via test messaging, we'll also need your client's mobile phone number. Really easy to do. It's just a csv export from your CRM or your Excel spreadsheet. Then we import it to the system and then it just starts sending out the requests on autopilot.

Robert Plank: Awesome. As we're winding this down, something that always comes to mind, especially lately is how many, I'm always wondering how many business out there are already plugged in? How much competition is there? Off the top of your head, would you say that with the companies you deal with, what percentage even does something like this? What percentage even has some kind of review system in place, would you say?

Doren Aldana: That's a good question. I'm probably a little over-cynical because most of the people I talk to don't have jack in terms of a system, so I might be a little overly biased, but I would say, to be relatively as accurate as I possibly can and also conservative, I'd say probably about 5-10%, somewhere in that range.

Robert Plank: Dang, so one out of ten, one out of twenty.

Doren Aldana: Very, very few. Yeah.

Robert Plank: If any business just plugged into this, they would automatically be ahead of most other businesses out there as far as this kind of stuff.

Doren Aldana: Oh dude. This is a game changer, not just in terms of getting reviews, but also, we teach our clients how to convert at least 20% of their database into rave reviews, sometimes more, sometimes a whole lot more, but on average at least 20. If you got 100 people in your database, we got at least 20 glowing reviews for you within a matter of seven days or less with the Testimonial Engine, but we don't stop there.

Then we go one step further. Because I'm a marketing expert, I'm thinking to myself, how can we optimize the lifetime value of your clients so you're not just getting one transaction but multiple transactions. What we figured out is that the best people to send referrals, which by the way is the most profitable way to grow your business. It's five times less expensive, five times more profitable than getting clientele through paid advertising, studies show. You can get referrals from these people who are giving you positive reviews. Think about it. Who better to get referrals from than people who've raised their hand and sung your praises in the form of a rave review?

Robert Plank: Right.

Doren Aldana: There is no better, right? We now teach our clients how to strategically launch a dedicated referral attraction campaign to the rave reviewers, their happy clients who have given them four star or above. I developed this killer letter called the Magic Wand Letter. It goes out in the mail, snail mail, with a tangible toy magic wand enclosed, so your clients can't ignore it. They have to open it. Their curiosity gets the best of them. There's something lumpy. They gotta figure out what it is, right? They open up the mail. They open up the envelope. There's a toy magic wand in there and the headline says "I wish, I wish, poof, I could have more clients like you." I know it's cheesy as hell, but it works. It works really, really well. In fact, one of my clients sent out 50 of these letters and generated 18Gs in commissions from 50 letters, five-zero. It cost him $200, made him 18Gs. How's that for an ROI?

Robert Plank: Freaking amazing.

Doren Aldana: Yeah. It might be cheesy, but it'll put more cheese in your wallet. Would you like to be cool and broke? Or cheesy and rich? I don't know about you but I prefer the latter.

Robert Plank: Yeah. I'll take a little bit of a hit from my pride and my ego to get some money, for sure.

Doren Aldana: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Great. This sounds amazing. The Magic Wand Letter and your Testimonial Engine sounds amazing. I understand that you have a free gift of some kind for us. Is that right?

Doren Aldana: I do, yeah. As we speak right now, I don't have the page ready. It'll be ready by the time this podcast hits the streets, but I've got a special domain that I've put together. It's for anyone listening, any of your peeps listening, Robert, who would like to get access to that Magic Wand Letter in a Word document so it's 100% customizable for your own respective business, as well as a bunch of tools and templates and checklists and swipe and deploy, proven and effective referral as well as review request letters and campaigns. It's all encapsulated inside of an awesome resource called the Ultimate Testimonial Toolkit. It's got a $97 value. I'm hooking your peeps up with this for free if they go to MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert. MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert, you just pop in your info, press submit, you're good to go. It'll be sent to your inbox within a matter of a few minutes.

Robert Plank: MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert. Is there any other web address you want to send people to? Or will just that one do it?

Doren Aldana: Yeah. If you want to learn more about the Testimonial Engine, you can go to MyTestimonialEngine.com. We have lots of information there, a blog, free demos, and a $1 trial. We've got a free course. There's lots of helpful stuff there.

Robert Plank: Awesome. MyTestimonialEngine.com and more importantly, MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert to get the Magic Wand Letter. Man, thanks for stopping by the show, Doren. This whole idea with the review stuff, it's such a simple idea, but it's something that a lot of people don't do. Within the idea, it has all these little clever twists which I really enjoy. I think that this is awesome strategy and I liked it, so thanks for stopping by and telling us all about it.

Doren Aldana: Hey, thank you. I love the work you're doing. You're doing a great job, so keep up the great work man.

Robert Plank: Cool, same to you.