Episode 528: 4 Data-Driven Insights To Optimize Your Smart Shopping Campaigns #528
4 Data-Driven Insights To Optimize Your Smart Shopping CampaignsLearn how to put company, competition, and Google data to work to improve the…
Organizing data into clear hierarchies using DAM, PIM, and MDM systems is essential for e-commerce companies to find assets, power search, and scale from small business to enterprise level.
Amazon has hired 80% of the master data analysts in the country.
Interview with Rob Neumann on Data Management, Having 1st aired in 2009, with over 3.6 million downloads in 100+ counties, “SEO Podcast, The Best SEO Podcast has become one of the longest-running and most authoritative podcasts for staying ahead of the perpetually changing digital marketing landscape.Great for internal marketers, business owners, and agencies from novice to experienced in using the internet to…
A DAM, or digital asset management system, stores and manages images, artwork, and 360 views. A PIM, or product information management system, handles technical data, pricing, and product details. Both are needed together for e-commerce because companies rarely keep all of that information in one place.
Master data management drives taxonomy, meaning it defines relationships between terms so search returns accurate results. The episode uses the example of typing a brand name and getting only the gun rather than every part with that word in the description, which required intelligent data structuring to achieve.
Stephen Covey's principle of starting with the end in mind applies directly. Plan the hierarchy from the top down, identify what you need to measure such as price, cost, and inventory, keep data clean and complete, and structure it consistently from the start so it stays usable as the business grows.
Digital asset management is all of the pictures and 360 views and artwork. And Pym is product information, technical pieces, pricing, those kinds of things. And companies never have that all in the same place.
Rob Neumann
if you can't find it, you cannot deliver it. And if someone on your website or your e-commerce site can't find what they're looking for, I guarantee you they're not going to buy it.
Rob Neumann
bad data in, bad data out. Like if you're using like just a basic CRM system, okay, or some kind of sales tool, like if you're not putting the data in, in the right place or in the proper place, it's going to be very hard to analyze that data
Host
Hello and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing interview style podcast. Today I have one of my mentors, Robert Newman here, who has bought and sold a number of digital agencies. He built up an email automation company before email automation was big. And now he works on big infrastructure projects. He's actually one of our partners when we do large RFPs for DAM, PIN, big e-commerce solutions. And so I thought it would be good to bring him in to kind of talk about maybe what a DAM analysis is. A lot of the companies, Rob, that we're working with are just have their digital assets everywhere. Or if they want to campaign for SEO in a particular area, they have not every they don't we don't know what they have, like on a particular topic or a particular keyword. So we're having to search all over the place for their content, for their videos, for all this kind of stuff. But but before we get into that, why don't you kind of introduce yourself a little bit more and then we can really get into it. Fabulous. Matt, first, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It's always great. Well, first, I like hanging out with you, but it's great to talk to you. And I'm really excited about this topic. As you know, e-commerce is is really at the forefront right now and doing it well is actually hard. And I think that's one of the reasons why companies are out looking for information. And I'm really thrilled to be able to share this. So thanks for having me. Awesome. So background that you asked about, as you said. Right. So I'm an odd marketer, started my life as a engineer, went into FAM. And so I became one of those. I've owned two ad agencies, built a CRM and marketing automation company. Of course, been a independent consultant and now work with with my partner on core shop solutions. And what we do is primarily large scale enterprise level e-commerce. So we're
typically working with companies in the 10 to billion dollar range. So 10 million to billion dollar range. And and the reason why that particular zone is because of the number of products, the as you said, the amount of information, the number of images and actually being able to keep it all under control becomes very, very hard. If you're multi brand, multi store, multilingual, multi currency, you know, even, you know, even just trying to sell into Canada is a is a bit of a difficulty because, you know, you have to you're required by law to have French here. It's useful to have Spanish. So you're already dealing with three languages to handle two countries. So these are the things we specialize in. And I think that that we can answer a lot of questions and do some some really good education today. So I think what would be helpful is for you to maybe just give a high level overview of when we're doing a dam analysis for a company. What are those steps that you need to go through when bringing on a new client? Absolutely. Well, you know, let me first give you a definition. A dam is a digital asset management system. These terms aren't necessarily very popular. I've actually changed it to image database image databases. Right. Well, the proper name is dam. But, you know, to just explain what it is, is it's a content management system for images and it allows you to basically in a get it fashion, be able to now move through and enhance your images, be able to tag them, manage them and keep them in such a way that you can find them. It drove me nuts as an agency owner, thinking about the tens of thousands of dollars I was paying in in photography and then always having to buy a new one because I couldn't find ones I'd used before and were appropriate for a client. So that's one thing you can do. But the other thing that a dam will allow you
to do is actually to merge these images and text. And therefore, you can instantaneously create to the web. You can create mailers. You can create catalogs. So all of these kinds of things become easily mergeable. And that's what takes it to the next level that makes it a dam. Yeah. And I think that a lot of people out there and me included use the terminology a little bit more loose as far as data asset management is like the data collection process for a particular campaign. Right. And where all this stuff stored and like how everything's linked together from an access standpoint. Right. What platforms are you using? How are they all connected? Like like certain people have like one login to something else. And if that password changes, it will break their email forms, you know. And so so so what we like to do is, you know, really get an idea of how everything's put together and how everything is merged. And then on a content basis, not just images, videos, text, where are they all stored? Like what is that hierarchy look like in most small businesses? Because I do work with a lot of small businesses. We do have some publicly traded companies. And for those really bigger RFPs, you and I get together. And I like that we we work from a platform to like I love that PIMCOR when we've done these deals. There's no licensing fees. Right. Right. And so that that's one of the huge advantages over like Magento or something like that. But but really, I take like just like SEO is this term that is not just ranking you. OK, in the position in Google, it is expanded to you need to run my business, generate me leads, help me close sales like I'm paying you to be my actual like it's really like fractional CMO. Right. Like that's actually what people are hiring us to do today. And they're calling it SEO. And so that damn analysis continues, I think, to have a broadening aspect
to it of like what it encompasses. And really, that's like one of the kind of front end audits that that we do is that collection process to figure it all out. You're you're you know, like where you go is after you have it all. Now, how do you push it out to multiple places quickly? And that's that's where you really get the leverage and advantage of technology of having a platform can do that. And then, you know, one of the other things that I think is worthwhile to talk about is PIM. Right. So like PIM and damn go really well together. Why don't you kind of provide a definition for that and kind of your your your view of how that operates? PIM and damn, how do they work? They're kind of two sides of one point. Digital asset management is, you know, all of the pictures and and 360 views and artwork. And PIM is product information, text, technical pieces, pricing, those kinds of things. And companies never have that all in the same place. And in some ways, it makes sense. Right. You've got finance working on the numbers. You've got marketing working on campaigns and you've got product managers trying to put together blueprints and technical drawings and all of those kinds of things. But the truth is, to do e-commerce well, you need all of it. So to do that, you need to be able to bring it together. You need to be able to enrich it and you need to be able to deliver it in such a way that it comes together at the right time. And the truth is, keeping all of that up to date isn't really easy. You've got to be able to do that quickly. And that is exactly what a PIM dam system does. There are many of them. You know, we work on PIMCOR together. There's Akinio and Perfion, which my company just added as exclusive representatives. There are InRiver and the list goes on. Right. But all of them have this in
common. Right. And that is that it's really designed for companies that have a lot of information or complex information or a lot of a lot of variety. And that often happens in a couple of places, either clothing, because you've got sizing, colors, length. All of those things increase a lot of goods. And then in a business to business application where you have things like kitting or sub kits and the ability to sell parts, you know, little tiny parts to full assemblies. That makes for a lot of information that the typical and actually all e-commerce really begin to fall down on and they get slow. And Matt, as you know, no one likes to be slow, even with fiber. It's all about customer experience, right? It really is. Well, yeah. So let's continue down that path. Let's talk about MDM, right? Master data management, like how that all fits in. Like, let's talk about putting all the different pieces together for people that are either operating in this world. They're like kind of a CMO or kind of brand manager. I know that this is what we deal with when we're working with like bigger, bigger type clients. But I think that the benefit to smaller type clients is very important to understand like data hierarchy, right? Like I think the data hierarchy and organizing stuff in a certain place so you can find it later. I mean, basically, it's bad data in, bad data out. Like if you're using like just a basic CRM system, okay? That's right. Or some kind of sales tool. Like if you're not putting the data in in the right place or in the proper place, it's going to be very hard to analyze that data and to see, to have visibility on what's happening, right? And I think a lot of small business owners are struggling with that. So maybe there's some kind of basic tenets of fundamental like data management that you could recommend. And maybe we could go through some of that here today. Absolutely. And in
fact, you're right. This is universal. Whether you're a small business or a large business, every single time, this is what we see. You go in and you begin to look at the data. And guess what? Some is incomplete. You're missing certain pieces. You think it's there, but it's not. Or if it is there, it's repeated 20 times. You have, you know, you have, you just have all these duplicates. And what you find is that your data, for lack of a better word, isn't clean, isn't complete, and isn't, you know, contiguous. And what do I mean by that? Well, you were talking about hierarchy. So starting when you're a small business with the aspiration of getting to a big business, think about how you save and utilize and keep your data evergreen or refreshed, up to date, right? This is a on-demand world, not a yesterday world. And so being able to access your information, whether to deliver it to a customer or actually run a report is really important. And so what do we see all the time is thinking about what's the hierarchy. Look, Amazon didn't get to be Amazon just by the fact that it was a good idea. Bezos knows. He knows everything. Amazon has hired 80% of the master data analysts in the country. I didn't know that. 80%. So when he comes back and says, would you be interested in, or people like you are buying, there's a reason he knows that. And he has structured his data in such a way that he's able to read that and think about it. The second thing that's really important about this is just plain finding things, right? So if you can't find it, you cannot deliver it. And if someone on your website or your e-commerce site can't find what they're looking for, I guarantee you they're not going to buy it. Whereas Amazon, you can type in gibberish and it often will come up with what you're looking for. And that's because of a word called taxonomy. Master data really
drives taxonomy. Understanding the relationship between the word book being both an audio book or a Kindle book or a hardcover book and being able to create some sense out of that of what are you looking for, right? So it's an e-book or a, you know, you begin to have modifiers. But the truth is, he breaks it down to those modifiers to improve search. Those kinds of principles work whether you're an ad agency just trying to find, you know, what client has this photo versus what is my royalty-free license stuff. All the way to a large company being able to say, you know what, I have four different pricing for four different kinds of clients and I need to keep that straight. All of that comes down to master data management. So, yeah, you're starting to take me down another path and we will come back to e-commerce. So we'll circle back to e-commerce, but I'm going to go a little bit different direction here, which you can provide, I think, a lot of insight and value to. And I think for a lot of people listening that this will be insightful, okay? First, I want to say you brought up taxonomy and that's a lot of what I'm dealing with more and more from the SEO side of things of how a website is structured. Most people are building a website that might be extremely beautiful, but it's like the facade of a house on the outside with no pipes and no electrical connected. No one's doing tags. No one's doing custom post types. Basically, the information to give to the algorithm, you have to organize that data, right? So, like, your blogs need to be tagged a certain way. Your services need to be tagged a certain way. Like, if there's something special you're doing, you need to set a custom post type to let Google know that everything in this area is about this topic. Like, so you were talking about e-books versus, you know, hardcover books. Like, those are subcategories, but really
a website, when we look at it, and I have some tools that provide visual representations of how a website's built, most of the time when clients come to me, like, none of that's been done. And so, you're basically going, Google, figure it out. Tell us what's important, right? And interlinking with pages. There's so many different things from a technical SEO standpoint that people aren't doing. They're like, oh, it's SEO optimized. We filled out meta descriptions, you know, or something of that line when we're talking about specifically WordPress. Because, you know, Rob, I deal with a lot of, like, I like WordPress. Like, look, like, you know, I feel like a lot of these other platforms, even like Shopify, right? So, like, I love Shopify from an e-commerce standpoint. I actually love it as a business model because it's got a, you know, a processing component built in. But I have to build a WordPress site and then attach it to the Shopify site because I got to have the WordPress drive it, right, from an SEO standpoint. So, I like the ecosystem in WordPress a lot. But taxonomy is something that's extremely important that not a lot of people really focus on. But it would save somebody. Okay, so this is where I'm going to go where it's going to be a little bit, we're going to go into the CRM space. And I'm going to talk about some of the stuff I'm currently dealing with because one of the things that I was actually going to do next month and then, you know, COVID hit and, you know, everybody had to kind of pivot and change is I was going to do a mastermind, all right, on, like, how to scale an agency. So, you know, we're in the multimillion dollar kind of range right now with eWebResults. And I doubled the business last year, okay? And, like, how did we do that, right? It was from organizing the data properly because a lot of times what people are doing, like, we're using
a CRM system. And I'll give you an example. So, you got projects, right? So, I'm using something called teamwork, right? And so, I've set it up where there's projects. And in each campaign we run is, like, a three-month campaign. It's put into a project. And then each month I created a milestone. And then I created task lists to tie into each thing that we're going to do. And then subtasks of, like, hey, how to upload a blog, how to create a blog, the full process would be, like, a sub list to that, right? And so, I can build a campaign and I can get visibility on what's happening, okay? Also, like, I used to waste a lot of time just trying to find something to get a project started, right? So, like, having data organized to get it at your fingertips, to have the right passwords in some place, like, so the password management tools are extremely helpful because, like, I feel like so much time is wasted by me or my team if information is not at our fingertips and organized so we can get started on our project. And that's why we put off working on it. And so, if you, like, and I know you built and sold a CRM, I mean, like, I would love for you to talk about some of the things that we've talked about, best practices. I mean, we could always talk about email automation at another point. But really, it's all about how you organize the information, how you build the strategy, how you structure it. That's going to determine, like, if it's going to work or not. Like, the process is so important. And if you put bad data in, like, I'll give you an example, a lot of people use, like, chat functions like Slack or, you know, something like that. And people use, like, okay, we'll create a channel for each client or for each topic. And then you've got to dig through those channels to find those links because you're not using
it properly. You're not using the CRM properly. It's like people that are using HubSpot. So, I'm HubSpot certified. We go into clients that are paying for a really nice vehicle, a lot of bells and whistles. You can do a ton of visibility with what's happening on the website of, like, you know, conversion rates. Like, it's amazing, right, of all the stuff they can do. But what is mostly happening when we log in is they're paying $300 a month to send out an email newsletter. There's not even, like, complex email automations going on. And there's even, like, even MailChimp does all the stuff that, like, say, 80% of the clients we're working with are doing. And so, there's a threshold, I believe, of when you start moving into some of these larger platforms where you're going to need, like, the dam or PIM structure built out, right? And what you said in the beginning, I think, is so important. And I wanted you to kind of talk to it a little bit more for small business owners of if you want to become a big company, you got to plan to do that now. It's like the e-myth book. You know, I forget who it's by. But basically, you know, you got to organize the company of what you want it to look like when it's where you want it to go. And you have to organize all those different hats and all those different duties. And then you're wearing 50,000 hats. And then you take those off as you hire people so you know who's accountable to what. But I think starting out proper is going to save, like, so much time in the long run. And so, I just wanted to kind of hear from you. And then we can jump into e-commerce of maybe some tips for small business owners that are looking to scale their business or that they're just starting out. How to organize their data on a very, very simplistic level where you're using Google Drive or, you know, like,
whatever you're using to organize data, right? That's a great point, Matt. And to be honest, every level of business, you continue to hit. I like to say we hit a plateau and then we start to climb the mountain again. And I'm actually in the middle of climbing the mountain again right now of, you know, how do I get even better at it? And I do it for large companies. And you think, oh, it's easy. It isn't easy. It doesn't matter who you are. It isn't easy. But Stephen Covey wrote, you need to start with the end in mind. So where do you have to get to, right? As you were just talking about, I've got a three-month campaign and I break that down. I think that's a good process. You have to think about, right, if I'm a little, if I'm a retailer, right, and I want to bring on a new set of, you know, I want to move in a new line of, say, toys, right? Now I want to bring in Legos and I've got to think about what Legos, you know, are going to sell and who am I going to market these to? Well, you need to break that down, just like any plan, and then begin to put together all of the information that's going to go to it. But I think the key things are that you keep, the things that you want to measure, right? I want to be able to measure profit. Well, what goes into that? My price and my cost, both fixed and variable. So I've got to make sure I'm tracking that. How much inventory am I able to spend and carry? Who's walking into my store right now? Do I actually understand that? Do I have 11-year-old boys coming in right now to buy Legos? And this is a long time ago. Maybe they're younger now. Everyone seems to be aging. But, you know, do I have the appropriate kids walking in or do I have to get them in? And as
you think about those things, you put together the information and you think about it from a tops-down view, right? What's the goal? And then what supports the goals? And how do I actually make sure I've got the information all the way down? And that's the same with every kind of piece of information that you do. And I'll share with you what I'm struggling with and has been one of the biggest challenges for me as a manager for quite some time. And that is utilization, right? So in creative processes, right, we all go off and we think about, oh, I'm creative. Well, how long does creative take? Because every hour you spend on that creative, it's costing me something, right? And how do you handle that kind of flexibility? So utilization and then output, right, what am I able to do is really important. And I haven't put my finger on it effectively for a long time. I have rough measures, you know, I clock and I, but in the end, right, what I did is two things. One, right, simple, I've been in this a long time. How long do I think it would take me to do it and then add 50% for somebody else? And can they hit that? And then the second one is, okay, for a certain dollar value, right, what's the maximum number of hours I can take? And that is the same whether you're in a technical service business like I am or a creative business or SEO, which is technical marketing. You know, there's some break-even point where, you know, this is as much as I can spend on it. So let's make sure that we're able to break the work down in such a way that we're smart. And believe it or not, that goes right back into master data management. Time, product, profit, pictures, all of those things need to get managed. Yeah, I mean, I use the kind of gating process or milestone process to measure it, to measure the sprints, right? Like from
a project management standpoint, I like to do it, I like to do three-month sprints or I like to do month sprints because I can measure what happens from here to here. And then I can make adjustments. And, like, when you start a project, you're like, hey, we're going to build a, like, I don't look at a website as one project. I mean, I do, but there's different, like, milestones that you have to hit in there. So, like, even on the front end, before we get started, like, something that would take up a ton of our time is we would do, we started out just doing mock-ups, right? Like, hey, the client's like, I don't care. Like, I'm going to love it no matter what, no, it's not true, right? No, it's not. It's not, right? Like, so they're like, they're like, no, you got it or whatever. Like, they have preferences, but they don't want to, like, they want to be coy and they don't want to tell you what those are. And so what we've done is we've actually required, okay, part of our website process is we're going to build you a brand guide, okay? Because you're going to ask us for literature, you're not going to like the stock art we use if we don't do a photography shoot or you don't have the right pictures, and you're going to approve it, right? And then when we come back and we provide the mock-ups, like, it's going to match the brand guide, and guess what? If you don't like that, you didn't pay attention to the approval of the brand guide, and if we have to go back and redo the work, we're going to do a change order, okay, because you approved it. Now, we might waive that depending on, you know, like, just how, I guess it's not arbitrary, but we would decide, like, whether we should waive that or not, but it protects us from scope creep. Like, scope creeps, like, I
think the killer is, like, if you budget X number of hours for a website, and then, you know, you're like, oh, we burned up all our hours, and you're, like, 50% done with the project. Like, wouldn't it be good to have known that way sooner and help set the expectations to even hit timelines? And, like, if clients are not getting back to you in time, like, it's real easy for somebody internally to get something back, to send it out to a client, wait for them to hear back. A week goes by. They follow up with them. The client finally looks at it, gets back to them, and then they get the process going, boom, that's two to three weeks just right there. So, like, if someone wants a website in a month or 45 days, like, you've got to keep it tight, and you've got to know when you start getting off track and how much of that project you're burning. And so the reality is we kind of break it down into content. We break it down into images, like we're building the puzzle pieces, but we've got to have the right blocks, so we've got to kind of do that. Like, I even require people to do a workshop with me to understand their business, to build out, like, the right things from SEO standpoint that we need to go after and what their different products are. And it's almost like a business workshop. Like, they think of it like, hey, like, we help them organize their business before it goes online because online business is the same. It's still business, and some of these things haven't been fleshed out completely. And the more we plan on the front end, the more we organize that data, the more we put it together, the less changes there's going to be later, right? That's right. And there are certain approvals, and so I take a lot of these bigger projects and break them into smaller deals because if something's late or something's behind or something's
over budget, I would like to know as soon as possible. And I'll try to, like, address that sooner when it's, like, a molehill versus a mountain kind of thing. And I just, I see across the board people, well, even in construction, you know, they don't get approval on something and they start, you know, building in, you know, support beams or building a pool and, like, they don't really get the client's approval. And then what do they got to do? They got to back up and go fix it because they didn't get the client approval, right? And so it's so important to have the right process when you're putting this stuff together. And to have any of this kind of stuff online work, like, you have to get it right first because it's bad data in, it's bad data out. And regardless of how fantastic the recall is of these databases, if you put the wrong information in, it truly doesn't even matter, you know? That's right. That's right. And, you know, what you're doing is actually creating chunks of data, if you think about it, right? By creating this hierarchy, right? You've got a content piece, you've got an SEO piece, you've got this business piece, you've got a description of how you want things to go, and you've laid out a process. So you've essentially created this hierarchy and you know where things are going to be. And if you can think about things logically and lay out that kind of a process, it helps you understand your own hierarchy of information. And that's true of any business. And we wind up going in, I'll give you an example of one of our clients is a cell phone parts, accessory distributor, cases, you know, and screens and the little glass that goes on top of the cell phone. So they distribute that nationally and in Canada and to mostly independents that own, you know, franchises or large numbers of stores of the various carriers. And what we found is, right, what they couldn't relate,
because they're, they're, they're, they're, they had no ability to relate. You know, they knew by phone, right, what went with what, but they actually didn't know what brand between, so if you, so if you had a piece of glass, right, it might say every phone it went with, but you could never group it by, well, that's a Samsung. Believe it or not, so one of the things we did was create, if you will, hierarchies of, okay, these are all the Samsung phones, now let's go search for all the things with that TNA product, and now we relate it to that as a Samsung phone, and therefore anyone who's a Samsung dealer, we should try to sell this stuff too, as opposed to a one-off approach. And that may seem amazing for a billion-dollar company, but it happens all the time, right? They, they were able to sell the, the, the, the actual things they needed to sell, but they couldn't, the, the look was, how do I get that incremental revenue? And that's the relationship, right, that often you're missing. A simple thing like, sure, I know what phone it goes to, but what brand is that? Same thing happens in all kinds of businesses, right, where you're focused on the very small, and then you miss something in between. And it's those opportunities that really get you the opportunity to begin to think and reverse engineer, you know what, I've got a bunch of dealers who sell Samsung phones. In fact, almost all my dealers sell Samsung phones, and why don't I offer a, you know, an offer that if they buy, you know, a new set of Samsung phones, will help them take their trade-ins or, you know, whatever kinds of things that they run. Those are the opportunities that you get with good data. So, so as you were talking, which it was, is very interesting, it was a great example, I started to think about, I want to hear, and I think everybody else wants to hear, you, you work with
one of the largest gun manufacturers out there. So I feel like when you're talking about a case study, and we're talking about glass for, like, Samsung phones, to grab everybody's attention, because we know that, you know, it's like eight seconds, so it's like six seconds now or less. Like, if we're talking about guns, okay, I feel like people would be more engaged in listening, so whatever you have to share, or whatever you're doing, give me an example or a case study of what you're doing with the gun manufacturer, because I think everybody would like to know that, and that can show off some of what your capabilities are. Well, all I can tell you is, first of all, I'm very grateful they're an essential business, because right now they are selling all they can, and my real problem with that client is making sure that their e-commerce stays on at all times. We're getting a lot of heavy traffic. Now, you know what, there's, it's a really interesting business, because you have two kinds of clients, right? So obviously they sell to gun dealers, right? They're not selling to you and me, Matt, they're selling to licensed dealers, and those people are really two kinds of companies. Some of them are, you know, good size, you know, the academies of the world, or, you know, sporting goods, or hunting stores like Cabela's, right? They buy a lot of things, and they're pretty darn sophisticated. The other main customer they get is this little mom-and-pop, you know, gun range or gun store, and they're small, and they might buy, you know, a couple of things a month and some ammo, and, you know, and that's about it. And those two kinds of customers have to be served on the same platform. And so what we found out is, guess what, they don't search the same at all, not even close. So what happens is the sophisticated clients come in, and they have a list of part numbers, essentially, right? So you'd look at these numbers, they
put them in, and we had to make sure that our search was going to capture every single part number and deliver accurately with those companies' discounts. But on the other hand, your mom and pop don't know part numbers. They don't know SKU numbers of various things. They just write in Glock. Yeah. And if you type in Glock, right, so this is where Amazon-type stuff comes in. I type in Glock. Well, what we used to do is we'd return everything that had Glock in it. Well, it's the largest single thing on the site. And so it would be pages and pages of stuff. And what we had to do was begin to use some of that intelligent data to say if all they do is type in Glock, they probably mean the gun. Yes. Not a part. No. Not that. And we're laughing. But the truth is, right, when you're doing a program, it was looking for as long as Glock was in the description somewhere, right? And it would return everything. You could do force modifiers too, right? Exactly. Exactly. And you can do that. But we began to have to use some intelligence and bring some data in because it was frustrating. And finally, we sat down and had to explain, right, to our programmers, look, this is how a guy thinks about buying a gun. And what he does is, you know, the programmers putting in a SKU number made total sense to them because it returned one result every time. But when you put in this very general term, how do you handle that? And so out of that, the client has been really happy. And, in fact, we've got some new, we're now trying to make it easier for companies to actually be able to search and buy things. One of the exciting things we're doing is basically take a picture of what you want and we'll pop it up on the website. So that's going to take some programming. But that's some fun things. I'll give you a couple
of quick anecdotes, right? So right now, that website is running 30,000 orders a day. It is their best year ever. I know you said the CEO was like, you couldn't get her because she was loading things. She's loading trucks. On the trucks, yeah. That's right. All staff are loading trucks because they're falling further behind. Yeah, actually, it's a real problem because we'd like them to pay their invoices. No, we can't. We've got to keep going. Yeah, we've got to keep going. So that's absolutely true. Actually, the entire management staff has been out on the conveyor belts and with the trucks. And the thing is, they realize they've learned a lot of things that they want to improve. In some ways, they said, you know what? This has been really good. We learned how hard a job that is. What is that show? What is that show? Hidden Boss or whatever? Hidden Boss. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Undercover Boss. Undercover Boss, yeah. Yeah, she's not even undercover. Yeah, no, no, I know. I can just imagine, you know, in heels and, you know. In heels. You have to move in boxes, exactly. So, and the IT director has learned how to use a forklift and, yeah, they are cruising. But they've learned a lot. And one of the things, actually, that we're doing is going to be integrating inventory tighter with the website. Because when you're selling this fast and if you don't have a real-time inventory, we've got stock outages happening. And, and fortunately, the dealers and industries are, you know, and companies are pretty understanding going, yeah, I get it. He bought it just before I did it. But it's not how you want to run a business long-term. Yeah. Well, Rob, we're getting here to the end of this. I wanted you to, if there's anything that you definitely wanted to share or make sure, message that you wanted to get out there, as well as how to get in contact with you, you know, maybe in a nutshell, anything that you want
to share, please do so now. Hey, really appreciate it, man. So, our website is coreshopsolutions.com. That's core, C-O-R-E, shop, solutions.com. I'm on LinkedIn, really simple. It's Rob Newman, N-E-U-M-A-N-N. And I'd like to make an offer to, to your folks. I'm sure you're going to put out some links. But we have a really simple quiz called, Do You Need a PIM? And it'll give you an answer. And, and then we also have our offer that we do in conjunction with Matt on how to get your e-commerce up in 30 days. And, of course, there's some caveats and the most important caveat ever in data is the Pareto principle, 20-80-80-20. Stay on top of that. Thanks to everyone and thanks for having me, Matt. Awesome. Thanks again. We'll do it again sometime. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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