Ready to take your business to the next level? Join Chris Miles, the Cashflow Expert, in this exciting podcast episode where we dive deep into the world of marketing and consumer behavior with special guest Eugene Shatsman from the National Strategic Group.
Learn how to maximize your marketing strategies, understand consumer intent, and convert leads into loyal customers. Eugene shares invaluable insights on the evolution of marketing—from traditional interruption-based methods to today’s cutting-edge intent-based strategies.
Whether you’re a business owner looking to enhance your brand’s visibility or a marketer aiming to refine your skills, this episode is packed with actionable examples that drive real results.
Don’t miss out on this chance to boost your business’s growth and achieve financial freedom faster. Tune in, subscribe, and start creating that ripple effect today!
Passive Income Calculator: https://bit.ly/3XfzFBO
Eugene’s Links:
-Website: https://www.nationalstrategic.com/
-The Power Practice: https://powerpractice.com/
-Power Hour Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@PowerHourOptometry
TRANSCRIPTS
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What I always advise people to think about is how do you get into the mindset of your consumer, the person who’s buying? Because even if you’re selling, whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, the reality is for me, what’s working now is the thing that’s really worked well for age old marketing, which is,
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor. I’m going to show this for you. That works so hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money. Start working harder for you today. You want that freedom of cashflow now, not 30 or 40 years from now, but you want it today so you can live that life that you love with those you love. But most importantly, guys, it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life because as you are blessed financially, you now have a greater capacity to bless the lives of those around you. Thank you for tuning in today. I know you guys have been binging on these episodes faster sometimes than I can produce ’em. You’ve been sharing ’em with others so appreciate because without you, I cannot create that ripple effect, and that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.
(01:14)
So thank you so much for allowing me to live my purpose so that you can also live yours. As a reminder, guys, you can always follow us on social media. You can always go to App Money Ripples on any platform, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, heck, Twitter, or X, or whatever the heck they call it nowadays. You can follow us at Money Ripples, so be sure to find us there today. Alright guys, I’ve bring on a special guest today that I thought would be really fascinating, kind of gives you a different perspective than what we normally get. I know we talk a lot about financial freedom and things like that, but I know many of you guys are business owners and part of that, if you want to have financial freedom, is you going to have more money. You got to have more cash.
(01:48)
And the best way to do that, especially if you’re a business owner, it’s more marketing, right? With more marketing comes more sales, more revenue, and thus, hopefully more profit. And that allows you to create more freedom, especially time freedom later on. Not to mention creating more time freedom in your business too. And that’s why I brought Eugene Shaman here on with us today, guys. He’s actually the owner of, well, he’s the managing partner of National Strategic Group. He’s been doing everything from practice growth, especially if you’re an optometrist. I know several of you guys are optometrists, he’s specifically in your industry, but these things also apply to business strategy in general, consumer behavior marketing guys, even things like how to reactivate your clients or customers and text marketing and email marketing, digital traffic, SEO website, all this stuff that I know tech-wise, I’m an idiot when it comes to those kinds of things.
(02:33)
I’m glad there’s brilliant guys like Eugene that teaches this too. And he’s got his team of 150 people that really help do this and have worked with over 1500 different teams and locations across the country to allow you to be able to have those better results. And so I’m bringing on Eugene here because I want to know specifically, and I’m sure you do too, is what can we actually be doing? How can we actually find the right recipe or that unique little formula that helps us get the max results possible? That’s why Eugene’s here today. So Eugene, welcome to our show.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Excited to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, man. So give us a little bit more of your background. I mean, did you just crawl out of the crib being a marketing expert or did you do something different here?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, no, so my background is that I studied at the University of Michigan and I tried to find, the question I kept trying to answer for myself was, why do people make decisions in the marketplace that they make? Why do people choose one company over another or this product over another? How do people generally make decisions? And unfortunately, there was not really a consumer sciences type of major or something in college. I think things will changed a little bit since then, but, so I ended up taking classes in economics, psychology, business, and ultimately just started realizing that the stuff I’m going to learn, I’m not going to learn by sitting in a classroom, but I’m going to learn by doing. So I started a small real estate business. Then after a small real estate business, I had a small consulting company, then I worked for a big company, and then I decided that around the 2008, 2009, well call it setback for most businesses, I thought this was the biggest opportunity for businesses.
(04:18)
And that’s when I went out on my own and started National Strategic and National Strategic at the time was just a company that was me and a couple in a small roles to help me, but that company was designed to help add a layer of strategy to small businesses that were still trying to market. They had a voice in the marketplace and I thought everybody’s doing one thing, which is pulling out, you got the recession during the recession, everybody pulls out. Well, the reality is that what that does is as a marketer, you look at the market and you say, well, the voice, the share of voice is up for grabs. There’s got to say the right thing. And so that’s when I developed a whole bunch of strategies to say, okay, how can businesses market in a tough economy and how can businesses get share of voice in a tough economy? Because the ones that are doing it in a tough economy are the ones who are going to really explode once the consumer opens up their wallets full blast. Again,
Speaker 2 (05:18):
I was just thinking about when you said that, I mean obviously you started your business in a tough economy, which is not easy, but I know when I look back, in some ways I feel almost like marketing was easier then too. And maybe it’s because a lot of the competition disappeared. People weren’t advertising much, but at the same time also there was less distraction, there was less things with social media and things like that. How have you seen marketing evolve since even 15 years ago?
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Well, and you got to realize, Chris, that 15 years ago, we still had dinnertime conversations where, and maybe like 16, 17 years ago where we could ask each other a question and somebody wouldn’t know where to go find the answer. You would be, oh, who was in that movie with that guy? And about the thing today we’re habitually trained to pull out a phone and say, okay, movie with guy with that, and we’re going to find that answer on any smartphone. But we did not have the world’s information in our pockets at that point. You have to realize that the iPhone and that the smartphone really was a product of about 15 to 17 years ago, and it wasn’t really as mainstream back then. So people did not expect, we as consumers took over a decade to train us as consumers to expect ease of accurate and accessible information at our fingertips.
(06:37)
So when you think about that from a marketing standpoint, what that did is it actually, it ushered in the transition from what we’d call interruption based marketing to intent-based marketing, and I speak about this all the time, where you think about what the role of marketing has been from the very, very beginning, think printing press, somebody’s putting an ad on the newspaper during the printing press era, and what would be the purpose of that ad? Well, the purpose of that ad, you’re getting the newspaper to be educated about something, and the purpose of that ad is to interrupt your education or interrupt your interest-based reading to say, oh, cool, there’s some sort of commercial offer there, and it’s an interruption, right? So take that to radio, tv, even social media. The whole idea is even today you’re scrolling through kittens and babies and whatever, and there’s something that interrupts your scroll with an ad that’s interruption based market.
(07:32)
And that’s one type of marketing that we as marketers have been conditioned to say, that’s the thing, that’s the that works. That’s the thing that you just have to hit the consumer seven times and blah, blah, blah, and create the most effective Super Bowl ad and do and impressions, impressions, impressions. And then what happened with the air of the smartphone is that we had this category of marketing get created almost, which was intent based marketing because when I intend to do something like let’s say I type in financial advisor near me, or I type in, how can I start saving money without putting it in the bank or something? I don’t know. You start asking questions, all of a sudden, I have an intent, and if I’m typing in financial planner near me, obviously that intent is much higher than if I’m asking a question, what is a great investment vehicle outside of 401k? If I’m asking the question, probably lower intent, higher in the funnel, if I’m typing something in financial advisor near me, eye doctor near me, whatever that looks like, that’s intent. And so being able to serve that intent has become the battleground of marketing over the last decade. And in all reality, we didn’t really get that good at it. I think your observation that it was kind of easy. It was pretty fricking easy when it was a wide open field, and the only thing people were doing to do that is some crappy Google ads,
Speaker 2 (08:59):
SSEO. That was pretty much the big thing, right?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, I think SEO and SEO has evolved a lot. And so Google ads, SEO was, but crappy, SEO, so you weren’t really serving that. It wasn’t that hard to serve that demand if you ultimately had the best product. Today, there’s a lot of people who have realized that intent-based marketing is conversion driven marketing. If I put an ad in, just think about it. You put an ad in the Superbowl, unless you put a QR code, you have no idea what people did after they watch that ad. You can get a little bit of a sense of, oh, people went on the website, but if I put an ad specifically into an intent flow, like financial advisor near me, I put an ad into that intent flow. Well, I can find out relatively quickly whether that ad is working, whether it’s not, and what kind of intent and how many of those indicators of intent are leading to actual phone calls and real money in the bank for me. So it kind of changed the entire landscape of marketing from my vantage point.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah. Well, I know you’ve worked with a lot of optometrists and people in that and that basic health field for them, often it can be very location specific, so at least it’s targeted in that scenario. What do you do for those that maybe aren’t so targeted?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah, so there’s maybe a couple categories, and we tend to work with, we’re big in the medical marketing space. Almost all of our clients are in the medical space. And so yes, optometrists, ophthalmologists, but also the people who serve those people are clients of ours. In fact, it kind of turned into the world of, hey, we have a huge client list inside of a particular industry, and then people who want to sell them diagnostic devices, software, that kind of stuff, they came to us and said, can you help us market to those people? Obviously you understand how they think because you got ’em to sign up with your services. And we said, yeah, sure, we can figure that out. So this is where you get into, what I always advise people to think about is how do you get into the mindset of your consumer, the person who’s buying?
(11:06)
Because even if you’re selling, whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, the reality is you’re doing business with a mother, a father, a parent, a person who’s under pressure at work, a person who’s trying to make some sort of decision with a lot of distractions going on, whether they’re making a decision while they’re getting five minutes of peace from their kid with the door closed and they’re sitting on the toilet trying to scroll through some stuff, or they have a controlled process where they have to justify to six bosses above them that the decision they’re about to make is a good one. Anyone making a commercial decision is still a person, and being able to appeal to that person is really, really important. That’s what a lot of marketers forget today, is that they spend a lot of time thinking about how do I describe the benefits of my product at the broadest possible level? How do I talk about my features without understanding what is the one person who I’m trying to appeal to? Who are they? What are they going through? What is their reality like and how do they really make decisions in their life? So I can appeal to that. And if you can do that, then you’re doing things that are different than what most marketers are doing, and then your message will actually stand out.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it’s funny, even as you’re talking about that and just the different things, of course, I started thinking about optometrists and ophthalmologists thinking like, oh yeah, when Avatar came out, it could be like the whole I see U thing, and it’s like, oh, yeah, you do see them. It’s almost like a meme worthy thing that you could do just to grab attention.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
And I’ll say something about that because I think it brings in the whole concept of social media, and the truth is that there are very few businesses that know how to do well on social media. And social media isn’t really designed to be a place where you can post on Facebook or Instagram every once in a while and then all of a sudden a flood of customers comes in your door. I see that as a huge amount of wasted resources. Even clients come to us and they say, oh yeah, my biggest problem is I need to make my social media better. And I was like, well, yeah, your social media looks like crap, but even if you posted Mona Lisa like content on your social media without spending some budget and understanding who you’re trying to appeal to, and the truth is there’s going to be like five people who see it and they’re going to see it, and they’re not going to take action because it’s interruption based marketing. And so think about the intent you’re trying to serve and also think about, is that the right place to spend your dollars,
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Right? Yeah, exactly. I know with our own marketing, we’ve done everything from Google Ads and we’ve done everything from Facebook marketing and of course with Facebook ads and things like that, but at the end of the day, for us, it’s always been our podcast. That’s where the relationship is really built. The trust is built because you try to interrupt people throughout their day, but it’s just another distraction, and then they’re going to get distracted by something else, pull their attention away from your ad anyways at some point, because Facebook is so good at that stuff mean, is it more just how to create that relationship with people? I mean, what is it that you see online that really gets people to stick behavior wise?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Well, so I would say there’s three things that you have to consider. Number one, and people ask me all the time, Eugene, what’s working today? What’s working now? You got ai, now you got this thing, you got that thing. And there’s always a new thing in marketing, right? Of course. Oh, meta allows you to do this with ads. Now you think that’s the big thing. Oh, hey, Google just came out with Performance Max campaigns. You think that’s the big thing? Now, the reality is, Chris, number one thing, and this is probably the biggest message for your audience to take away today, is that number one thing is that everything you do needs to be a test. And when I say this, I really mean a scientific test where you’re trying figure out what the actual outcome is, and you’re doing a postmortem to say, I did this, and then I changed this one variable, and then I did that, and how did those fare? So every time we send an email, right, email still works. Email gets great results. When we reactivate client’s, patients, and customers for our clients, one of the things we find is that our return on investment is over a thousand percent For every dollar spent, we can bring back a thousand dollars.
(15:25)
And the way that we can do that is we create messaging that makes absolute perfect sense to the person in their particular condition. And then we test it. Because every time I send out an email, if I’m sending out to a 10,000 person email list, I’ll take 500 people and we’ll send this type of message. We’ll take another 500 people, we’ll send that type of message. We’ll subsegment the list to a level that you can really understand exactly what variables you’re trying to isolate, and maybe that variable is the age of the person. Maybe that variable is the length of engagement since that person’s worked with you, but you test one variable at a time, and then you evaluate how each subsegment responds to that one variable change. So I might have two subject lines, but I might have 20 subject test groups that I’m sending that subject line to and to see, does this subject test line work best with people over 50?
(16:24)
Does it work best with people over 20? That kind of thing. And the same is true of your website. Everybody listening to this podcast who has a business, has a website. I will challenge all of you to ask the question of how many split tests are you currently running on your website? And if the answer is not that many or zero or never done it, never don’t know how to do it, talk to your marketing team or talk to whoever’s managing that website for you. You should be running split tests. Here’s what we found. It’s the easiest way to make more money. It’s the easiest way to generate better return on investment. The cost is negligible to run split tests. You just need to have a good marketer who keeps coming up with the split tests you’re going to run. And sometimes we’ll move a video up on a particular page or we’ll add a video, and by simply adding a video, we can increase conversion rate by 8%.
(17:14)
That’s 8% more customers from the same amount of traffic. You didn’t have to increase your, you’re out of pocket, right? Zero out of pocket. You didn’t have to spend eight more percent on traffic. You didn’t have to spend eight more percent on anything. You just got to use the people who came to your website either saw version A or version B, and you learned that version B was better, and then you adopt version B and then you try to beat version B. So for me, what’s working now is the thing that’s really worked well for age old marketing, which is testing, testing, testing, and then using that testing to leverage the new technology to appeal to the consumer and treat ’em as a person.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Give me an example of how that’s worked with one of your clients.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
So a great example would be I had a client in the cash paying medical space. So they have a expensive procedure, and they had a, actually, it was kind of funny. They called and they said, we have to scale back our engagement because our revenue’s not so good this quarter, so could we spend a little bit less on marketing this quarter? We’re struggling a little bit financially. And I said, I have an idea. What if we spent more on marketing and got more leads, but I would take a hundred percent of the risk? And I said, oh, well that sounds interesting. Okay, this is a cash pay procedure, right? So I said, okay, tell me about your sales funnel, right? So their sales funnel was pretty sophisticated. Somebody expressed interest in this procedure. It was lasik actually, somebody expressed an interest in lasik. They would get a phone call, they would get a text message, they would get an email, they would get a series of emails, and then maybe they’d come in for a consult, maybe they wouldn’t come in for a consult.
(19:05)
Then there would be some additional follow ups, and then there would be some phone calls and whatever. But after about 90 to 120 days after that, the lead was dead, just dead. And I said, okay, fine. How many dead leads do you guys have in your database? And I said, well, good luck. We don’t even know. It doesn’t really matter because they’re dead. We found that generally they’re not going to, we call ’em again, they’re just not going to pick up. It doesn’t really matter. Okay, fine. So we took a list. There were thousands of people on this list, not tens of thousands of a thousands, whether we took this list and they said, let’s think about what appeals to these people. Let’s think about why they may have wanted to get vision correction in the first place. Is it because they want a better lifestyle?
(19:55)
Is it they want to be able to have freedom? They might be able to want to see the alarm clock in the morning. They may want to be able to go for a bike ride with their kids without their glasses falling off. Maybe you have to know enough about the LASIK procedure to know that it’s ideal for people in their early twenties through early forties, but really for people in their twenties and thirties. So think about what are the lifestyle things that people in their twenties and thirties do? And then you have to think about the objection. So what are three reasons why somebody wouldn’t get lasik? Well, number one’s the cost. I don’t know if I can afford this. So maybe we can work on that. Objection. Number two might be, I’m scared of a laser shooting in my eye, so I don’t know about safety.
(20:37)
And number three is I don’t know if I’m a candidate, for example. So if I can give you targeted messaging that gives you both the benefit, the lifestyle message benefit, as well as addresses one of your objections in some sort of subsequent marketing. My hypothesis was if I do that and I test the crap out of that, what will happen to those people? And so I’ll spare you the complicated setup of combination of texts and emails and whatever, but it wasn’t just like, Hey, did you want to get lasik? It was very much targeted to pull at the exact emotional state that that particular lead was in. And if you communicate to that exact emotional state, what am I worried about? What do I want? What’s the pain I’m running from? What’s the desire that I’m running towards? If I can communicate in that language to those people, what can I get?
(21:30)
So that was my hypothesis. And I told the client, I said, look, your SEO, your Google ads, maybe you want to scale that back, but what I’ll do is I’ll do this completely risk free and I’ll charge you. I think I said 10% of the revenue that we’re going to generate for you for this. But what’s funny is that in 90 days, Chris, and this client was in a little bit of crisis, but in 90 days we generated over $450,000 of new surgery for them from that list. And it was a complete windfall, and it was a complete windfall, but it was done through testing and through meticulous communication with the patient exactly where they’re at.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
I love that. That’s amazing. So Eugene, if people want to reach out to you and look at your services or even just asking questions, what’s the best way they can go and follow you, contact you, what’s the best way to do that? Yeah,
Speaker 1 (22:16):
So two things. If you’re, you’re interested in the vision industry, I do run the industry’s biggest podcast that’s called The Power Hour, and I’m the show host of the Power Hour podcast, power Hour Optometry podcast. I really have a lot of fun doing that and enjoyed having you on that show as well, Chris. But if people want to learn more about the types of stuff that we do or just reach out national strategic.com, that’s the website, national strategic.com, that’s the website, the company. And while we do prioritize and generally work with medical companies in the medical field, the reality is that I’m happy to advise anybody at any stage of business and actually love mentoring people who are looking for ways to grow and identifying opportunities within the market space that they serve.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I appreciate you being a Go-Giver and being willing to be so generous. I appreciate that a lot, and I know the rest of our audience would too. One last question for you before I let you go is we talk about the Money Ripples, the ripple effect that we create with Money Ripples. What do you feel like is your ripple effect that you’re here to create?
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Yeah, one of my favorite things, Chris, if I think about why I do what I do, is I think about a text that I got a long time ago from a doctor who basically left working for the Cleveland Clinic. He was a little burned out going in through the grind, whatever, and he started his own practice and he started working with us. And then at one point, his practice grew and all this type of stuff, and he sent me a picture of his deck that he had built, and he said, I lived in, I’ve lived for 10 years in a house where my kitchen table can’t fit me and all my kids. And now I have this deck where we’re all having dinner and we’re really, really excited because, and without you, we couldn’t have had this, the financial freedom to be able to afford things like this.
(24:20)
And it was also the guy who invited me when he bought his next house, he invited me and a few other people to his thank you party that he had for people who helped him make it happen. Just a huge amount of gratitude for that guy. And I give it right back to him because he had just been such an incredible influence on me. But I realized that when I was getting those text messages, I’m like, I love helping people grow. And what I realized is that every single business owner that I impact impacts all their employees, impacts all of the clients’, customers, patients that they serve. And I realized that that’s the impact point. And so now in my current role, while I work with fewer clients directly, I work with 150 employees and every single one of those employees has an opportunity to make an impact on one of our clients or on maybe multiple clients, 10 clients.
(25:10)
And you think about how that web spreads and how we have the opportunity to truly make a giant, giant difference on millions of people every single day because of the business owners that we set up for success are truly running the kind of business that they want to run and are truly having a massive impact and are really, when I think about marketing, we’re trying to communicate some massive value that other people don’t have access to in that same marketplace. So if they’re really adding that kind of value to their local communities, it’s an incredibly gratifying feeling for me to be able to start at the top and kind of add that impact Ripple after Ripple after Ripple.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I love that, man. Well, again, Eugene, appreciate your time today. Really informative. It’s got me thinking about my own stuff too. So I really appreciate stir stirring that creativity and stirring that pot a little bit more. And we’ll put your Power Hour podcast as well as your website in the show notes here so everybody can follow you and definitely encourage that. So I appreciate your time once again.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
It’s a pleasure to be here, Chris. Thanks
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Everybody. Like Eugene said, you got to be a little bit of a scientist, right? You got to be willing to test and try things out. If you don’t, how are you going to know you’re going to get better results? And sometimes the biggest money, the biggest money leak you have in your life is the money you never created in the first place. So guys, instead of just listening to this podcast, go and do something about it. Go and make it a wonderful and process week, and we’ll see you later.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Thank you. Hey,
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Visit us online@moneyripples.com for more resources to help you fix money leaks and get your money working harder for you. Now.