How to Market You Business Online | Tara Ingalls

Podcast Transcription:

Tara Ingalls [00:00:00]:
I was on the phone, with somebody doing a marketing consult and found out that they’re paying a company out of state for, about $52100 a month, and they don’t know whether that’s translating into business for them.

James [00:00:14]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures. The business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumph and successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at draw in customers dot com. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, and today, we’re welcoming slash preparing to learn from Tara Ingalls of Tingle’s design for the 3rd time. Mhmm. That’s how awesome of a guest you are.

Tara Ingalls [00:00:38]:
3 Pete.

James [00:00:39]:
3 Pete. So welcome to the show.

Tara Ingalls [00:00:41]:
Thank you for having me.

James [00:00:42]:
Thanks for being on here. So tell me a story. Let’s just start with the the beginning, way back when.

Tara Ingalls [00:00:49]:
You always have me start in the beginning.

James [00:00:51]:
I know. Well, just for the people that weren’t lucky enough to watch the first two.

Tara Ingalls [00:00:53]:
So I shouldn’t look at the camera? I should look at you? No.

James [00:00:55]:
Just look we’re just chilling.

Tara Ingalls [00:00:56]:
Okay. We’re just chilling. Okay.

James [00:00:57]:
So what year did you start your business?

Tara Ingalls [00:00:59]:
So I started in 2000. So we’ll be celebrating 2000. Yes. So we’ll be starting, we’ll be celebrating our 25th year in January. Super excited about that.

James [00:01:07]:
That is

Tara Ingalls [00:01:08]:
awesome. Quarter Century started when I was 8.

James [00:01:10]:
I just raced through my head, like, 2,000. Okay. We’re talking internets, 5, 6 years old.

Tara Ingalls [00:01:15]:
Yeah. Right.

James [00:01:16]:
Social media is not even a phrase.

Tara Ingalls [00:01:17]:
And coding websites with HTML.

James [00:01:20]:
Oh, my gosh.

Tara Ingalls [00:01:21]:
I learned it from a book.

James [00:01:22]:
It was great.

Tara Ingalls [00:01:23]:
It was great.

James [00:01:24]:
No Dreamweaver. No. I mean, Photoshop, you’re splitting stuff up. Right?

Tara Ingalls [00:01:28]:
Little bit. Yeah. Photoshop and Illustrator are out for sure. InDesign was just coming on the market to compete against Quirk Express, which I was extremely proficient in.

James [00:01:36]:
Quirk Express. Oh, my gosh.

Tara Ingalls [00:01:38]:
Cork Express. Yep. Wow. So all my designers that I hired were all InDesigners. And so, you know, I held out as long as I could. But now I don’t do any of the layouts. So Alright.

James [00:01:49]:
I

Tara Ingalls [00:01:50]:
don’t have to worry about it. Oh. Hands off. I’m done. Alright. Yeah. But that, yeah. So 2,000, I got married and my name changed from my t hallum, which was my email prefix where I worked, and it changed to tingles.

Tara Ingalls [00:02:03]:
People thought that was very clever and fun. Nice. So I started freelancing on the side. And then in 2001, actually, shortly after September 11th, I quit my job and started freelancing full time.

James [00:02:16]:
Wow.

Tara Ingalls [00:02:16]:
Yeah. And just been growing exponentially since then. Primarily working with small businesses, startups, nonprofits. I love working with nonprofits. And then we also work with larger companies that don’t have graphic designers on staff that have a marketing department but don’t have, like, that graphic design skill set, we can come in and we can help, them out. So Alright. Yeah.

James [00:02:38]:
So in 25 years Yeah. The landscape of graphic design has probably changed a lot. It

Tara Ingalls [00:02:43]:
has a lot. It’s so

James [00:02:44]:
The programs. Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:02:45]:
The So much more digital than we used to do about 25% web and then, you know, 75% print work and trade shows and sales collateral and all that kind of stuff. Now I would say it’s probably completely flipped on its head. We’re doing I mean, my firm is doing probably about 75, 25. So 75% website work, digital, digital social media creation, digital marketing ads, that pay per click, that kind of stuff.

James [00:03:11]:
And then

Tara Ingalls [00:03:11]:
but our bread and butter at Tingles has always been logo design, sales collateral, like high end branding, like the look and feel of a brand. How does a brand wanna feel? What is their messaging strategy? Who’s their target audience? Those kinds of things is what I specialize and focus on as the owner. Alright. And then the designers really take all of that and, you know, spice it up with some amazing design work and

James [00:03:34]:
Nice. Yeah. Tell me a story about the social media end. Because 2000, social media is not a thing. Yeah. Now social media is definitely a thing. Yeah. You get 50,000,000 platforms.

James [00:03:45]:
Yeah. You get different audiences on each one. You have different ways. I don’t even know all the all the variables.

Tara Ingalls [00:03:53]:
It’s I can hardly keep up.

James [00:03:55]:
I had somebody ask me, what’s my Instagram handle? And I’m like, dude, I’m over 40.

Tara Ingalls [00:04:00]:
I don’t

James [00:04:00]:
have an Instagram handle.

Tara Ingalls [00:04:02]:
Handle? It seems like such an old school.

James [00:04:04]:
Or whatever.

Tara Ingalls [00:04:05]:
Yeah. I mean, the Snap Talk, I’m not on those. I you know, it so my advice when it comes to social media is to do the legwork to understand which one of the platforms your target market is on and then do that one really well.

James [00:04:21]:
Okay.

Tara Ingalls [00:04:21]:
And then, you know, maybe have 2 other ones that you also have a presence on that might be the 2nd and third. But if you pick 1 and you do one really well, you know, that’s gonna be your best bang for your time and, you know, for your dollars. The the problem with social media is that people think that it’s a sales tool and it really is not meant to be that. It’s meant to be, you know, a way for, to me it’s like a it’s like a customer service Dropbox in a lot of ways where people can, you know, they have the ability to send you to write reviews both positive and negative. They have the ability to comment on anything you post positive and negative. And it’s so it can be, you know, somewhat of a, you know, unless you’re not unless you’re managing on a regular basis, people will start to feel like as a business owner, you’re not engaged. You’re not really using the platform unless you’re commenting back and things like that. So a lot of people will say, oh, I’m on Facebook but I’m I don’t get any business from it.

Tara Ingalls [00:05:18]:
Well, that’s not the point. The point is to use Facebook specifically to manage your relationships with your customers and your potential, prospects and not necessarily like 20 25% off, you know, if you sign on now, things like that. So Oh. I mean, the scope of of Facebook has changed considerably. Even I’m having trouble getting my my following to engage, comment, and like, and share on our posts and things without having to pay for it. And so I feel like that’s completely shifting now and the algorithms for people engaging with content, you know, watching your eyeballs and how you do all that kind of stuff has really got people pretty spooked and stuff when it comes to Facebook. So, spooked.

James [00:06:00]:
But How so?

Tara Ingalls [00:06:01]:
Just like, you know, people like my husband and I were in the market for a bed and we were talking about it in the car. I opened up Facebook and I literally had a Tempur Pedic ad for 300 bucks from Slumberland.

James [00:06:11]:
Oh, creepy.

Tara Ingalls [00:06:12]:
Yeah. Very creepy. As I had just said, I know someone who is the general manager at Slumberland. So, like, it heard the word Slumberland. It heard the word bed, you know, and it served me an ad. And it was like you know, and some people were like, wow. That’s perfect. You know, clicked on the ad, and now they’ve got $300 off the Tempur Pedic.

Tara Ingalls [00:06:28]:
You know? These people morons. This is creepy. But for me, I was just like I was annoyed, and I actually deleted Facebook on the spot. And this was like a Friday. And by Monday, I was back on it because I was just like, you know, I need it for business. I, I needed it for business. And, you know, I I don’t know. Like, I still connect with a lot of family on Facebook and things like that.

Tara Ingalls [00:06:48]:
So I tell people it’s for my business, but it’s, you know, it’s I also use it socially. So, but, you know, I’m the target demographic for Facebook. You know? Sure. I started using it when my 18 year old was an infant and, you know, so I’m that demographic. But so, yeah, I I don’t know. Social media is just blown up with so many different platforms and so many different options and ways that you can, you know, that are some are entertainment, some are business based. You know, it’s just the consumption of content. I have 3 teens and it’s just it’s crazy how much content they consume, you know, and it you know, and what it does to their behavior, what it does to their language and the way they dress and all those kinds of things.

Tara Ingalls [00:07:26]:
I mean, that’s a whole rabbit hole I feel like we could talk about another day. But, yeah, social media has considerably changed. But I yeah. So I tell people to pick one platform that they’re very comfortable on, to make sure you’re managing that, make sure that you’re getting reviews on that, and just make sure that you’re talking to people and that you’re that you’re responsive and that you’re present on those platforms. Because I feel like you can try to be on all of them but you’ll do all of them poorly, but you could do one really well. So that’s kind of my advice.

James [00:07:55]:
Tell me a story here because I like to not spend time on my business.

Tara Ingalls [00:07:58]:
K.

James [00:07:59]:
I like to just make money.

Tara Ingalls [00:08:01]:
Yeah. Right? And me too. But

James [00:08:03]:
Have it just show up. Right? But you know what I mean? It’s so social media to me is painful.

Tara Ingalls [00:08:08]:
Okay.

James [00:08:08]:
I don’t like it. I don’t I mean, I don’t like posting or coming up with posts and stuff

Tara Ingalls [00:08:12]:
like that. I mean, you don’t have to be on it. I mean, it’s it’s the people who are, like, if they’re retail or they’re service based and they want that feedback, they want the relationship, and they feel like that platform is going to help close that gap or make that stronger, then, yes, I would say spend the time. But you might be like, you know what? Facebook is just we’ve tried it, tested it. It’s not working for our business, and we don’t wanna use it. You don’t need anybody’s permission to not use it. I mean Oh, I love that. Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:08:38]:
I mean, I people love it when I tell them they only have to be on one platform. They’re like, wow. That’s great. I didn’t know that. It’s like I need they needed permission from a professional to say you don’t need to you don’t need to be on the mall. But if I mean, it all comes down to your goals. What are you trying to do with your business? Like, you’re might be beyond the point where you don’t need awareness anymore. You just need, to get people to rebuy if they’re current customers.

Tara Ingalls [00:08:59]:
And that way, I would recommend you try different marketing tactics for for those kinds of things. So Yep. It’s just it it’s about your goals and what you’re trying to do with your business at the time that you come on board and either hire my firm or work with a marketing consult.

James [00:09:12]:
Right. So we I’ve worked with a few marketing people. Because I’m like, social media, do this for me. Yeah. And I remember one of them, they were coming up with a lot of posts. Yeah. It was pretty cheap but they’re it was garbage.

Tara Ingalls [00:09:26]:
Yeah. I call that canned content. So a lot of times, they’ll hire these outside companies and They’ll do a great job interviewing you and they’ll do a great job, asking you questions about your target audience, learning about your products and services. But they’ll put out content that just is not engaging. It’s not spur of the moment. People know that it’s canned and kind of preloaded. And so what happens is people stop engaging with that content. And then Facebook says, well, nobody likes you anymore.

Tara Ingalls [00:09:52]:
We’re not gonna show it to your fans. And and that’s literally what happens. And so if you don’t get engagement in your content, you will start to stop showing up for even the fans that are on your page. So my rule of thumb on and my advice on social media is that it’s best on boots on the ground. Somebody in the company that is that that’s their day to day that can do the behind the scenes videos, that can do the unboxing videos. Facebook is that. It’s faces. They wanna see faces.

Tara Ingalls [00:10:18]:
And even at Tingles, like, I put stuff up for our Halloween spirit week, and I can already see, like, it’s the most engaging post I’ve had probably in the last couple weeks because people wanna see faces. They wanna see people doing things, and they wanna, you know, feel that kind of human to human thing. So I would just be careful to hire these companies to do this content without being part of that conversation. Like, oh, hey. We had this 20 year anniversary and here’s photos from our party. Put that up as well. Because when you hire those outside companies, it can be, it it can be just, you know, it can be like evergreen content about your business. The other thing that I find is that people forget to remember is that people are joining your Facebook page all the time.

Tara Ingalls [00:11:01]:
And so if you’re not constantly telling people who you are, what you do, how you’re unique, you’re kind of missing the mark there because all that content gets pushed down. You know, when you first start building your page, you have your mission statement and your logo and your themes of content. But then, you know, you forget that 18 people joined last month and those people haven’t seen those messages. So repeating your content on a regular basis, you know, your story, your why those things can become really important

James [00:11:29]:
rules? Uh-huh. Or I imagine this gray area to a lot of this, but you have a post. It took you some time. You take the photos or video or whatever and find it, edit it, all this jazz. And to me, it seemed like that’s an awful lot of work for something that may never get seen by anyone but me or the person I’m paying to edit that. Yeah. So can you repost posts that you’ve done before or the the social media gods get pissed at that?

Tara Ingalls [00:11:55]:
No. I don’t it’s a good question. I don’t I don’t think you can on Instagram. I know you can pay on Facebook, you can repost things, and then add your thoughts to them so you can repost a post. I know you can do that in events and stuff, but, I don’t know that. Post.

James [00:12:08]:
No one else has.

Tara Ingalls [00:12:10]:
Honestly, if you want people to see the post, you gotta put money behind it now. Like, you have to boost Is that

James [00:12:14]:
the game?

Tara Ingalls [00:12:14]:
You have to boost or you boosting is sort of like I don’t know. I used to say that boosting was the, like, the dollar bin at Target. You don’t need any of that stuff, but it’s like the low hanging fruit that Facebook’s like, you should boost this to reach another 1,200 people. Do it, but spend maybe $10 on it. You know, I wouldn’t spend, you know, $1,000 on it. But, if it’s something really specific that you’re trying to reengage your current fans on, you could boost it and, you know, see if that works. But regardless of what you do, you should be looking at the insights of Facebook or the analytics of Instagram or whatever to make sure that whatever you’re doing that has a dollar amount behind it is actually going somewhere and doing something. And insights will tell you, okay, looking at your last post for the entire month, this video got the most hits.

Tara Ingalls [00:12:58]:
It got the most comments. It got the most shares. So if you’re not, reviewing those insights on a regular basis, it’s sort of like throwing money out the window and hoping, you know, that something lands somewhere. So just like anything digital, there’s a footprint and there’s people, you know, there’s content that you can review, to make sure that those posts are actually going somewhere. And you may find that your videos of behind the scenes and I mean, it’s funny. We just moved into a new space and we painted a mural in my office behind me. The videos and the time lapse videos that we did on that mural was the most engagement I’ve had in months on my page. And it was just, again, like, I don’t know.

Tara Ingalls [00:13:37]:
Maybe it says something about the people who are following my Instagram and my Facebook. Maybe they’re designers and not my client, you know. So I don’t really know exactly why we’d be getting such traction on something that has nothing to do with graphic design. I mean, I guess it does. It was it was illustrated by, my designer, Cali, but we hand painted it. So and it’s not a service offering that we do with other clients. It was sort of out of the norm of what Tangles does. But I’d have never known unless I looked at the insights how many views that got and, you know, the people commented on it.

Tara Ingalls [00:14:08]:
It was a lot of family members that commented out of the great painting job. But, you know, that’s but but my goals on Facebook are to show the culture and show what it’s like to work at Tingles and how fun it is and things like that. I do not think of it as a sales tool at all. So Yeah.

James [00:14:24]:
So you’re moving yourself away from a commodity.

Tara Ingalls [00:14:26]:
Right. Right. So making Tingles more humanized and Mhmm. You know, why why would you wanna work with us because we’re fun and because we don’t take ourselves seriously and, you know, stuff like that. So that’s my goal for that platform.

James [00:14:37]:
Alright.

Tara Ingalls [00:14:38]:
LinkedIn, different goal, different

James [00:14:40]:
Tell me story about LinkedIn.

Tara Ingalls [00:14:42]:
So LinkedIn is gonna be more about the companies that we’re working with and the problems that we’re solving for them. So ABC company comes to Tingles and their website wasn’t mobile friendly. We were able to work with them to get a phenomenal website that, you know, works on tablets and mobile devices. Here’s a picture of that, you know, website. So showing people solutions of of you know, we can put that on Facebook too. That’s fine. But the goal of the LinkedIn is to get people to see that Tingles is solving problems for small business. And we’re doing it a way that is beautiful and designed well and and that kind of thing.

James [00:15:16]:
So do you put something in that post that says if you need help or anything like this or it’s just assumed, you know, who posted it so click on me, you?

Tara Ingalls [00:15:25]:
Yeah. I mean, my formula for social media that I tell people is to try to ask a question in the post and then end on a call to action of some sort. Whether it’s call now, visit the website, comment below, something like that. A lot of people put stuff out on social media with just statements, which doesn’t help your algorithm at all for engagement.

James [00:15:43]:
Oh, interesting.

Tara Ingalls [00:15:44]:
So on LinkedIn, I mean, I have a really good LinkedIn following. I have more people that follow me on Tingles than I’m connected with on LinkedIn. A lot of people ask that. Okay. Tara Ingalls is the owner of Tingles Graphic Design. Do you put content out on Tara’s page or do you put it on your business page? I have a lot more businesses following that than I have LinkedIn connections of other people that are following me.

James [00:16:06]:
And was that a natural or organic thing?

Tara Ingalls [00:16:09]:
Or did

James [00:16:09]:
you push that?

Tara Ingalls [00:16:10]:
I didn’t push it. We just when pages became a thing on LinkedIn, I created a page and then started putting content specifically about my work on that page. Because Tara Tara does lots of other things. Tara’s in rotary. Tara, you know, so I wanna put that out on my personal page versus my business page. But sometimes I will share business posts to my personal page. But that question I get a lot is, like, your name is on the door. Why wouldn’t you put stuff out on your on your actual it’s just kind of a test and a tinker.

Tara Ingalls [00:16:37]:
Right? So you’re, like, testing the same content on both platforms, which were, both pages. Which one’s getting more hits? Oh, well, it’s getting more hits on this page. I’m gonna do more on this page. So you have to just be cognizant of it and, like, follow it

James [00:16:49]:
and see how it works and stuff. Because we I guess, recently, we’re talking past couple months. We just started a page for this incredible podcast on LinkedIn.

Tara Ingalls [00:16:58]:
Nice.

James [00:16:58]:
And so you have a follower, you.

Tara Ingalls [00:17:01]:
Nice. Is that right?

James [00:17:01]:
5, whatever.

Tara Ingalls [00:17:03]:
Gotta start with 1.

James [00:17:04]:
Yeah. So you get that post that you stick all of this time, money, and effort or pay someone for them to stick time and effort in it and cost me money. I’m like, that post went to me.

Tara Ingalls [00:17:13]:
Okay. But what’s your goal with that page? Like, why did you start it? Because you wanna find guests for the podcast or you want to drive traffic to the website?

James [00:17:21]:
Build an audience. I guess it’s twofold. Right? You want cool people as guest.

Tara Ingalls [00:17:25]:
Yep.

James [00:17:25]:
Right? Granted today.

Tara Ingalls [00:17:26]:
K.

James [00:17:27]:
And you want audience so that when the guest comes on, they’re like, hey, I wanna be on this podcast because there’s an actual audience that’s gonna watch it.

Tara Ingalls [00:17:34]:
K.

James [00:17:35]:
So is it okay to have 2 goals?

Tara Ingalls [00:17:36]:
It’s it’s good to have 2 goals but you when you set marketing goals, you need to have, you also have to have like numerical numbers behind that. Do you do you wanna have, 5 new guests by the end of this quarter? And that will be a satisfactory result of your marketing efforts. Do you wanna have 15 more users that become subscribers to the YouTube page if that’s a goal? And then you also need to have a start and an end date. So you’re gonna start it on December 1st. And by the end of December, you wanna see this needle move in this particular social media marketing. If you don’t set those kinds of goals, you won’t really know what you’re trying to, you know, the time, money and, you know, what you said. Yeah. So, you know, and you have to kind of write that stuff down or it has to be part of your strategic plan so that you know what content you’re supposed to be putting out there and who you’re directing that content to in order to get those results.

James [00:18:35]:
That makes a lot more sense.

Tara Ingalls [00:18:36]:
Yeah.

James [00:18:36]:
So instead of me just throwing stuff at the wall Right. Or paying somebody to throw stuff at the wall, which is essentially what they were doing.

Tara Ingalls [00:18:42]:
Right. Because I You have them give you goals and say, you know what? Based on this trend of content that I’m seeing on your page, I think it’s realistic that by, you know, the end of, you know, the end of this quarter, I can get you 15 new speakers to line you up for all of next year. Well, then you know that the content is going to be, are you, you know, do you have experience speaking about do or do you have, you know, whatever that messaging is? Do you have experience talking about, marketing? And you could come on the show and talk about social media marketing for an hour. I’d love to hear from you. You know, that content is gonna be specific to what you want that person to to do versus you just being like, hey, my podcast is great. Go out and watch it. Like, that doesn’t

James [00:19:23]:
Please.

Tara Ingalls [00:19:24]:
That might help for the subscriber goal because you’re like, you know, I’m trying to you know, the the content for that might be, I’m trying to get small businesses to listen to experts Mhmm. Give away advice for free, you know, that are pouring their hearts out. And I’ve learned I have 25 years of experience. I know a lot about this stuff. Giving it for free and don’t make the same mistakes that I made. You know, listen to this person talk about how to use social media, how to set goals, things like that. So the content’s gonna be driven on based on what those goals are. And then again, at the end of that, you’ll decide was it successful, was it not successful, and then you’ll tweak it for the next quarter

James [00:20:00]:
or the

Tara Ingalls [00:20:01]:
next month or whatever you’re trying to do.

James [00:20:02]:
I love it. So if you’re let’s just say let me back up a step. With social media, I always feel like I’m behind the 8 ball. So I think, like, we did the Instagram thing. We started that. So you start out at 0 Mhmm. Ground level.

Tara Ingalls [00:20:15]:
Mhmm.

James [00:20:16]:
Now on Instagram, it feels like it’s been out there 50 years, but it’s been out there, I don’t know, a handful.

Tara Ingalls [00:20:21]:
Mhmm.

James [00:20:21]:
But everybody seems to have 5,000,000 followers. Uh-huh. The jazz. Like, who’s watching all this stuff? Yeah. So you’re Are you

Tara Ingalls [00:20:28]:
talking about video reels, or are you talking about still imagery on

James [00:20:31]:
I guess, what I’m talking about is if I’m a small business. Right? Let’s just say I’m a plumber. I started my first plumbing company. I got my wrench, my toolbox, my van, and I’m gonna get on Instagram because I know that people that have toilets and sinks are on Instagram. You’re shaking your head like I shouldn’t be on there?

Tara Ingalls [00:20:48]:
Not be on Instagram. Okay. Because, well, who’s the target? Probably homeowners. Sure. That, you know, maybe maybe for a specific service that he does, he does water heater inspections, whatever. I don’t know. Let’s say he does it. Because, like, it’s also based around a service or a product.

Tara Ingalls [00:21:08]:
Yeah. So, you know, maybe he’s got water heaters that he does inspections on. So he wants to target older folks that own their home that would be wanting to sign up for these annual inspections as he does or whatever. Alright. Instagram is not going to be a good place for him to to do advertising because the the demographic of Instagram, I think, is like 8 I don’t know this for sure but the last time I looked, it was like 18 to 40 year old. Do you wanna be targeting someone in like a 40 to, you know, 40 to 65 or maybe a specific demographic of town or whatever? So I guess the whole point of your question is marketing is this ginormous umbrella of services. And I think I said this in our in our last talk is that it’s extremely intimidating for somebody to look at how many different offerings you can do to market your business and have any clue which one to do. And so working with a consultant like me or somebody that does marketing, it’s their job to say, okay, here’s your budget for marketing.

Tara Ingalls [00:22:06]:
This is all you can spend. Okay. We’re going to go in this lane, and we’re going to do this. And we’re going to see if it works. Or based on my professional opinion, this is the lane you should be in. Here’s what it’s going to cost. You know, those kinds of things. I I think, like, social media, like, for that particular gentleman, like, I just did a website for someone who’s a plumber.

Tara Ingalls [00:22:23]:
He’s very, very comfortable on his phone, and he doesn’t wanna have to manage his website at all. And he’ll do videos and upload videos to Facebook and Instagram as reels, but he doesn’t do still imagery.

James [00:22:34]:
It’s

Tara Ingalls [00:22:34]:
all video. So, you know, it’s it’s like a behind the scenes of, you know, of him fixing a pipe or how he had to cut into a wall to find the source and how he does those kinds of things. That’s gonna be a lot more interesting than a still picture of a leak.

James [00:22:49]:
Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:22:50]:
So, like, there’s just there’s, you know, social media is just hard to hard to talk about.

James [00:22:54]:
Interesting. Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:22:55]:
It’s hard to be like.

James [00:22:56]:
It’s a lot.

Tara Ingalls [00:22:57]:
It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

James [00:22:58]:
Alright. Let’s shift gears in the websites.

Tara Ingalls [00:23:00]:
K.

James [00:23:02]:
So you have to have a website

Tara Ingalls [00:23:04]:
Yep.

James [00:23:04]:
Because there’s yellow pages aren’t really a thing anymore. So if you want it to be found

Tara Ingalls [00:23:07]:
Mhmm.

James [00:23:08]:
It’s websites.

Tara Ingalls [00:23:09]:
Yep.

James [00:23:09]:
Tell me a story about how that game has changed just in getting found Yep. And how people build their websites are it’s not just a home about contact us page

Tara Ingalls [00:23:18]:
kinda or

James [00:23:19]:
maybe it is. I don’t know.

Tara Ingalls [00:23:20]:
Yeah. So, website design is definitely being used from a standpoint of credibility and for people trying to find out more about you. It’s being it’s very hard to have a website that’s tiny be found, organ what they called organically which is basically by keywords and content only. And so unless you have a really robust website that has lots of blogs and things like that. So because I work with a lot of small businesses, we do design websites. We still promote website design, but we have to think about how we’re going to drive traffic to it. And it’s not necessarily just being found by Google alone. So digital marketing is becoming a very high priced commodity or or price that a lot of companies kind of jumped on the bandwagon the last couple years in trying to help companies get that exposure with pay per click, Facebook ads, you know, banner ads, digitally, things like that.

Tara Ingalls [00:24:15]:
But what I’m finding, and what I wanted to talk about today is a gross misrepresentation that a lot of these companies are not actually doing the services. Oh. They’re taking large dollar amounts from very small businesses and providing very little in return. I was on the phone, with somebody doing a marketing consult and found out that they’re paying a company out of state for, about $52100 a month and they don’t know whether that’s translating into business for them. Oh. And that’s a lot of money for me to swallow and be and so I’m gonna try to work with them and determine whether or not this reporting is actually generating leads and things like that. In 2023 and this year, I was brought on as a third party consultant to review digital marketing, services in the Madison area by reputable companies to determine whether or not the services were actually done and whether I could prove that looking at, let’s say, Google Analytics or traffic alone or forms being filled out, whether or not the services that they were paying for were actually being done. And in most cases, they were not.

Tara Ingalls [00:25:22]:
And it sort of breaks my heart to know that these small companies are seeing these big promises and then just not, not reaping the war rewards out of them. And there’s a lot of words like conversion and impressions and all of the thing all these things that as a small business owner, like, some of them I’m even confused by, what the difference between, you know, an impression and a conversion is. And, there’s just there’s right ways of doing things. And then there are ways of, you know, in my test and measuring and in my business, the way that I do things is very different from some of these companies. And I don’t I don’t know. Like, it’s I wrote a blog about it because I I was actually a victim of service mess misrepresentation.

James [00:26:11]:
Oh, you were? Oh, yeah. Okay.

Tara Ingalls [00:26:12]:
And what happened was I hired an outside company to help with the search engine optimization of my website. I know content based search engine optimization but I’m not as strong with things like pay per click and some of these other things and hired this company. Well the first thing they wanted to do was they wanted to make sure that my current website obviously had keywords in the right place and so they did this audit. Well, they went in and they changed a whole bunch of my keywords to interior design. Interior design? Interior design. No. Instead of graphic design, they changed images, they changed page titles, They changed content within my website. And my rankings plummeted.

Tara Ingalls [00:26:49]:
And this was like, it it devastated my online presence.

James [00:26:54]:
Is this a local company or this oh, my goodness.

Tara Ingalls [00:26:57]:
Company. And it not only devastated my rankings, but I literally fell off the first page. And I was on the first page for website design and it

James [00:27:06]:
was gone. Oh, yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:27:06]:
Overnight, just gone. It took 2 years to regain that by going back in, changing all of that. I mean, the drastic change of keywords in my website, Google was, like, blacklisted and just, like, I was on page, like, 9. I mean, no one was gonna find tingles. No. The only the only safe haven was that I had a a really good Google My Business listing, and so I was still showing up in the map area. So if people clicked on that, they’d get to my website. But, yeah, I was devastated.

Tara Ingalls [00:27:34]:
And so, you know, when I went back and said, okay, Why these why did this all happen? It was sort of like, oh, well, sorry about that. You know? Or I couldn’t get

James [00:27:43]:
those you too.

Tara Ingalls [00:27:44]:
Or I got them come or I was completely ghosted and couldn’t get anybody on the line to to stand up for what had been done. It was horrible. And yeah. So that happened to me. And then to find out basically, you know, that same year, some of my clients were hiring other digital marketing companies to do the same sort of work and finding out that they too were being duped by, you know, paying large dollar amounts. One of my clients almost went bankrupt because they were back charging him after he had canceled

James [00:28:11]:
Wow.

Tara Ingalls [00:28:12]:
For a contract. It’s just it’s real bad. So so I wrote a blog and I would love to share a couple tips Yeah. If we have time.

James [00:28:18]:
Please, please. You

Tara Ingalls [00:28:19]:
got plenty of time. Yeah. So I wrote a blog and the blog is called, Tingle’s comprehensive checklist for choosing a trustworthy digital marketing partner. And these are all the things that kind of I wish I would have done and things that I’ve learned after working with these companies on how to safeguard yourself so that you don’t hire a company, and don’t let them talk over you and and and those kinds of things. So there’s 10 tips in the blog, and we’ll link it in the in this You

James [00:28:48]:
got it.

Tara Ingalls [00:28:49]:
Video so you can read them all. But the first one is that it kinda comes back to goals. Right? So what are you trying to do with hiring this marketing company? What area of your business do you want to see move forward, and being very specific about your goal? So if it’s if it’s, you know, one service area, let’s take that plumber for example. So let’s say this plumber has, you know, a brand new area of his business where he’s doing, quarterly hot water heater checks. Don’t know if that’s a thing, but let’s say that that’s a product that he wants to start moving forward. Right? So he’s saying, I would really love for this product to take off. And within the Q1 of 2025, I’d love to have 35 clients because you and your marketing person have decided that that’s a good number and you’d like to have that. So you kind of determine that that’s the time frame, that’s the product that you want, and you, you know, so you’ve written that down and that is what you go to this company to do.

Tara Ingalls [00:29:45]:
So you’ve defined the goal. You’ve maybe defined at that point which marketing avenue that you wanna do. So let’s say you’re gonna do Facebook advertising to maybe get this out in front of some homeowners, whatever. So that’s a defined goal. The second thing is that if you’re gonna start, researching digital marketing companies to help you with this is getting a very detailed proposal from them. I’m not saying, like, you don’t want anything that’s like a one lump sum, you You know, for $25100, we’re gonna do this, or for $35100. It needs to be very detailed into what is the the the management cost gonna be versus what the actual ad spend is gonna be because they’re those are very different things. The ad spend is gonna be like their out of pocket expenses for running the ad for you, and that should be not marked up.

Tara Ingalls [00:30:29]:
It should be the same rate if it’s $300 or whatever. That’s what you should pay. But then there’s usually a management fee on top of that to do the creative for the ad, come up with the copy, that kind of stuff. But the other things that need to be in there is kind of what are these tools that they’re gonna use to make it rain? Like, are they gonna use Facebook, Google? Like, what are they going to use? What is the timeline? What are the costs? Again, like I said, what team members are they are going to be doing the work, and what is going to be the commitment length? So if you’re gonna start in January, by the end of March, or maybe we’re gonna have a meeting at the end of January. Again, all that stuff has to be in that proposal, for you to have any kind of leg to stand on if it’s not gonna work in the end. Then my recommendation is that you don’t send anything more than 30 to 60 days. A lot of these contracts are a year long, and you’ll hear from the provider, oh, we need to have it be a year long because it really doesn’t kick in until about month 6. That’s baloney.

Tara Ingalls [00:31:29]:
It should kick in the 1st week or month you start doing the campaign. Digital advertising is just at a digital footprint. You can measure, you can measure it. So that’s my recommendation on kind of that time frame. Get testimonials is kind of my 3rd tip is get testimonials from your industry, from someone they’ve worked with within the last 90 days. And I think that can go really far. And even if it’s not in your just get a testimony of somebody that they’ve worked with in the last 3 days that’s similar to the plan that you’re gonna do. And phone number, email, contact them and ask how it went.

Tara Ingalls [00:32:05]:
And, you know, you can, you can ask them, you know, how was the communication? Like, what was the reporting? Can I have an example of a report that, you know, that you, you know, that you saw? Things like that. Happy clients are gonna be more than happy to talk about their experience and their, you know, good good and bad. So, you know, that I think that’s really important. The 4th is getting examples of the reports. So a lot of digital marketing companies will be like, oh, you’re gonna get this, you know, quarterly reporting, this monthly reporting. And this phone call that I had with, you know, earlier today, he was getting Excel reports. It’s very easy to click on that cell and change that number. I wanna see, like, tangible reports, screenshots from Google Analytics, screenshots from actual form submissions of, you know, I wanna see, you know, I wanna see the the funnel page or the landing page that you’re gonna design that this traffic is gonna go to.

Tara Ingalls [00:33:02]:
You know, any of that reporting I think is really important. And and and I wanna know also is that gonna be in layman’s terms or is it gonna be using technical jargon? Because what is conversion? What is impression like we talked about? So asking for example reports and making sure that you know who you’re gonna be talking to if you have change requests or anything like that. And then the 5th thing, of course, the the 5th, which is the actual the the 9th tip is the, you know, the ethical and legal aspect of of kind of these contracts and and things that they put together is ask how they’re going to benchmark where you are right now and how they are going to show that the work that they’ve done is successful. And not at the end of the campaign, how are you going to like show me other reporting that shows this is where we started and this is where we ended.

James [00:33:53]:
To show that they’re on target.

Tara Ingalls [00:33:54]:
To show that they know what they’re doing, that they were actually able to provide the amount of leads that they’re promising you, because that is the one thing that that I’ve been told that people who’ve read this blog, that is the one thing that they’re not getting from these companies upfront. Is they’re like, oh no, we, you know, we can’t share that because it’s proprietary. Black out the name. I don’t need to see the name. I just wanna see how you’ve actually digitally helped these people by showing the numbers of, you know, conversions and and things like that. So Mhmm. Again, there’s, you know, there’s a lot of things in here. Getting getting more than one proposal is really important.

Tara Ingalls [00:34:32]:
Carefully reviewing contracts and and any hidden language in there that, you know, might be, you know, you shouldn’t have to sign a contract that’s 4 pages long for a month long commitment. You know, it’s either you can do the work or you can’t. A lot of times, the longer the contract, the more they’ve been sued or have had problems, in my opinion. So just

James [00:34:49]:
try to protect themselves in 50 different directions.

Tara Ingalls [00:34:51]:
Yes. So, you know, those are my tips when it comes to digital marketing. But, I think your initial question was, you know, how do you, as far as website design is concerned, yeah. I do think websites are still very relevant. I think they’re still really important. There’s a lot of really great do it yourself tools that people can use, nowadays, to get really good looking websites and, make sure they’re mobile and stuff like that.

James [00:35:17]:
Excuse me. Bless you. We can’t talk about design without talking about AI in this age that we’re in. I feel like I’m gonna

Tara Ingalls [00:35:23]:
ask you about AI.

James [00:35:24]:
I feel like it’s funny to me because the year 2000, the dotcom bubble or is that 2001? Dotcom bubble when pets.com was a thing, and then the world came to an end right there.

Tara Ingalls [00:35:35]:
Yep.

James [00:35:36]:
I remember all the crazy Super Bowl ads and all that sort of stuff. You could throw dotcom after anything.

Tara Ingalls [00:35:40]:
Yep.

James [00:35:40]:
And you got your 1,000,000,000 of dollars. Maybe back then, it was 1,000,000. Yeah. Now you can say you got AI. You got your 1,000,000,000. You’re raising money hand over fist.

Tara Ingalls [00:35:47]:
Yeah.

James [00:35:47]:
So tell me a story about how AI gets involved

Tara Ingalls [00:35:50]:
involved. I saw something that is, like, resonated with me. It said, AI is not going to take your job. Somebody who knows how to use AI is gonna take your job.

James [00:36:00]:
Oh.

Tara Ingalls [00:36:01]:
And that is, I feel like, a very good summary of where my industry is at when it comes to AI. My designers are very anti AI, you know, when it comes to certain things like, you know, generating logos or fixing, you know, like here’s a photo of 5 people. Make it so that it’s 2 people and, you know, fill out, you know, things like that. So they’re not they’re not they’re not ready to jump into using some of those tools that, like, that are at their fingertips right now.

James [00:36:32]:
Is that because of fear or is that because the result isn’t as good as it like?

Tara Ingalls [00:36:37]:
It’s not fear. It’s mainly because the result isn’t as good and it’s all it’s mainly because the result is not as good. Okay.

James [00:36:44]:
It’s got a little cheese factor to it. It’s got a

Tara Ingalls [00:36:45]:
little cheese factor to it. I mean, I’ve seen pretty amazing things with the what’s called, like, generative AI in InDesign or in Photoshop where, let’s say, you’ve got a picture of, like, 2 birds sitting on a ledge and you need it to be, and it’s a square image and you need it to be a panoramic image where you’re, like, take the text or the box and you’re out and you’re, like, fill in the rest. And it’ll, like, fill in more branches from the tree and maybe put a park in the background. Like, you can tell it what you want it to do. So that’s really interesting. I I haven’t done enough research to know, like, eventually, at this point, we’re gonna you’re gonna have to divulge, I think, that the the photo was created in AI or that it was edited or something along those lines. I don’t know that we’re there yet. I think that AI is going to get very good at knowing what is a real photo and what is not a real photo, either through some sort of weird coding within the file.

Tara Ingalls [00:37:37]:
It’s I don’t know, like, that part of it. But we’re using AI to help our clients be more succinct in their marketing. A lot of my clients are using AI to help them generate blog ideas, to take content that they’ve written and optimize it for keywords, for search engine optimization. They’re using it to write social media posts. I mean, you as long as you write a prompt that is very well written in 4.0, Chappie G4.0, you can generate tons of of content, that evergreen content that we’re talking about. The problem with it is it’s just vanilla. It’s all vanilla. And if you don’t add some sprinkles or something to it, it’s just going to be vanilla.

Tara Ingalls [00:38:20]:
So, you know, it’s good for generating lots of content ideas, but then ultimately, you really do have to take those and you have to, like, personalize them and and put imagery to them and

James [00:38:31]:
That’s fair. Has to say.

Tara Ingalls [00:38:32]:
It’s a good starting point. That’s what I feel like.

James [00:38:35]:
To fix than just to create Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:38:37]:
A lot

James [00:38:37]:
of times.

Tara Ingalls [00:38:37]:
Because I have a hard time writing content from scratch. Like, my daughter is is, applying to colleges right now and, she’s only 12. Just kidding. No. She’s applying to colleges just to write essays. Right? And, of course, like, you know, it’s easy just to go out to chat GPT and be like, write an essay that’s gonna make me sound amazing to go to UW. I wanna be a badger. But there’s no way that you wouldn’t read an article written by Chad and not know that it’s written by Chad.

Tara Ingalls [00:39:06]:
There’s no stories in there. There’s no personalization. There’s no personality in that copy or whatever. And I was the first to say to her, like, I’m not the right person to help you write this essay. I’m not a good writer. Like, I am a very wordy person. And so, like, I struggled, like, as her mom being, like, I’m not good at this. And I think it was hard for me to be, like, I’m not good at this.

Tara Ingalls [00:39:26]:
So we hired a career, a essay coach that worked with her 1 on 1 and helped her with her essay, and it ended up being perfect. And it sounds like her, and it’s her personality. And did they use chat? No, they didn’t. You know? So but, you know, I mean, I can imagine that that is an easy tool for people to pick up and manipulate Yeah. And and use. But I’ve gone to prompt writing seminars that teach you how to write prompts in such a way that gives you the output that you’re looking for because otherwise it’s super vanilla like we’re talking about. And so I think, if you go to those and you learn how to use the tools I mean, there are so many AI tools out there for so many different you can go I think somebody told me you can go out to an AI tool, and you can it’ll build an entire website for you on that AI platform. I have no idea if this is true.

Tara Ingalls [00:40:18]:
But go it’ll write all the copy. Like, I’m a plumber located in Madison, Wisconsin. Go out and build me a website. This is my business name, and it will build you a website completely AI based.

James [00:40:28]:
Wow.

Tara Ingalls [00:40:28]:
And I’m just like, yeah. Is that a little scary for me as a website designer? Yeah. Yes and no. But when that website comes back and there’s no keywords in it and, you know, it’s using stock imagery of of a plumber that’s not a real person or, you know, whatever, it’s just I don’t know. I’m not too worried about it in my career. Everyone is asking me those questions. But I think, like, good design is there’s still gonna be a place for really good illustration and hand drawn. I think I think it’s going to the AI is going to be the the opposite is going to happen is where people are gonna go back to paper and pencil, and the there’s gonna be more of I don’t know.

Tara Ingalls [00:41:04]:
I’m To the point of wax?

James [00:41:06]:
Or that

Tara Ingalls [00:41:07]:
Or the the wood carvings? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. No. I don’t I just think that people are going to value something that is is created by your hands more than they’re gonna value something created by a computer.

James [00:41:18]:
Right.

Tara Ingalls [00:41:19]:
I know. I created an AI graphic out on my Facebook page because we’re celebrating our, 25th January, like I mentioned. And we’re gonna be rebranding Tingles. And everyone’s like, I wanna see the logo. And I’m like, nope. We’re not gonna show it. So I went out to AI, and I said, generate an image of 2 witches standing in front of a cauldron with steam coming out of the cauldron, but I don’t wanna see the witches’ faces. And there’s an image out on our Facebook right now that was generated by AI that was not illustrated by us, and their, like, fingers are all, like, weird and, like, their face is not right and stuff.

Tara Ingalls [00:41:53]:
And I’m just like, you know, this is what AI generated. This is what the prompt that I put in. And we captioned it, something is brewing at tangles just to kinda give it some idea what we were doing with it. But, you know, to me, if I would have sent that to my designers and been like, hey, spend 6 hours illustrating this or 10 hours illustrating this, you know, is that the best use of their time when it comes to social media posts that they wanted to do? So I just I don’t know. I think we’re gonna go back to a medium where people are just not going to they’re not gonna try I mean, I don’t know. Some of it’s really scary. A little bit it’s a little bit scary.

James [00:42:29]:
Fair.

Tara Ingalls [00:42:29]:
Just the AI with identity theft and bank information and all that kind of stuff. I think we’re gonna go back to paper ledgers. So like, you know, checks, I think. I don’t know. I don’t know. Don’t Make

James [00:42:40]:
sure Scrooge, you skeptic.

Tara Ingalls [00:42:42]:
I don’t know something. It’s weird. But yeah. I don’t know. I’m in in my lifetime of my business. I don’t think it will be problematic. But Alright. But I do like the quote about, you know, somebody who knows how to manipulate the AI software will be the one who takes the job now.

James [00:42:56]:
That’s fair.

Tara Ingalls [00:42:56]:
Yeah.

James [00:42:57]:
It’s smart.

Tara Ingalls [00:42:57]:
Yeah.

James [00:42:58]:
Yeah. I’m afraid, to a point because of call answering service, and that seems to be Sure. I don’t know if it’s necessarily low hanging fruit, but I feel like a lot of AI places are treating it like low hanging fruit. Mhmm. I was like, we can replace the receptionist or secretary by having AI answer the phone. I’m like, I don’t know how many times I’ve had that artificial voice, you know, just like human person, someone with a pulse and a brain. Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:43:25]:
Someone with a pulse and

James [00:43:25]:
a brain. Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:43:25]:
Someone with

James [00:43:25]:
a pulse and a brain.

Tara Ingalls [00:43:25]:
Customer service. Customer service. I did not understand prompt. Yeah. Press 9 for customer service.

James [00:43:32]:
Programmer built you, somebody in a hoodie and crocs that hasn’t ever had to deal with this. I need someone that can eat a sandwich and not look gross to answer my question.

Tara Ingalls [00:43:41]:
Sandwich. Yep. Yeah. I don’t know. That whole the the robo bots things where, that is one thing. Please don’t put that on your website. Like, all these chat bots that are like, I’m an automated chat bot to answer your question about this company. I did.

James [00:43:55]:
I did.

Tara Ingalls [00:43:57]:
That is not going to give you business leads Interesting. Unless you were behind that chat.

James [00:44:01]:
So what we did was we are essentially or what we do is we essentially show that we can build these for clients.

Tara Ingalls [00:44:08]:
Oh.

James [00:44:09]:
Because because we can.

Tara Ingalls [00:44:10]:
Mhmm.

James [00:44:10]:
And it’s not

Tara Ingalls [00:44:12]:
With, like, frequently asked questions about the company? Those kinds of things? Okay. These are like open ended bots that are like No. Asking me anything.

James [00:44:19]:
No. No. No.

Tara Ingalls [00:44:19]:
You know? It’s just like So

James [00:44:20]:
this is stuff where you you’re inputting essentially, where the bot is using your website as information that’s pulling from.

Tara Ingalls [00:44:27]:
Got it.

James [00:44:27]:
Got it. So it’s not pulling from the entire web.

Tara Ingalls [00:44:29]:
Okay.

James [00:44:29]:
It’s pulling from your information, stuff that you feed it.

Tara Ingalls [00:44:32]:
But so, like, okay, let’s say for example, somebody wants to know what your pricing is. They just wanna know what your pricing is and that’s not on your website. How does

James [00:44:40]:
it handle those questions? Either direct you to a pricing page or it’ll ask you for an email address and say someone will

Tara Ingalls [00:44:45]:
follow-up with it.

James [00:44:46]:
Got it. Okay. Yeah. It’s not Jesus or something like, I have all the answers. Right? Or something like that. It’s like Yeah. What are your open options?

Tara Ingalls [00:44:52]:
But but you prompting it with information is very different than it, like AI going out to the World Wide Web and saying, okay. Here’s what you should pay for for a logo design. No. You’re right. Pay for, you know

James [00:45:04]:
Yeah. Should be 50¢.

Tara Ingalls [00:45:05]:
Yeah. 55. You know? Yeah. Or go to these websites that are cheaper than this website. I mean, you just that’s what would terrify me. It’s just, like, it would go rogue and be like, Tingles is not the company for you. I don’t know. Like, I

James [00:45:17]:
don’t know. So tell me a story because this the design thing is curious to me.

Tara Ingalls [00:45:21]:
Okay.

James [00:45:21]:
Because I think I’ve put stuff out there. Right? You got books and all that jazz. Yeah. And someone could say like, I was playing around with this kid. We’re at my son’s baseball game.

Tara Ingalls [00:45:32]:
K.

James [00:45:32]:
And she’s a big Taylor Swift fan.

Tara Ingalls [00:45:33]:
K.

James [00:45:34]:
And so I’m like, I’m gonna write lyrics for Taylor Swift’s song. Right? She’s, like, 7 years old. So it’s just kind of fun teasing there.

Tara Ingalls [00:45:39]:
Yeah.

James [00:45:40]:
And then somebody suggested that I use Chet GPT to write a Taylor Swift song, and I was like, alright. K. And so we wrote a tale or we I typed in prompts for Chet GPT to write a Taylor Swift song.

Tara Ingalls [00:45:51]:
Mhmm.

James [00:45:52]:
And we said, it was about Jets and hot dogs and baseball. Just weird stuff. I’m just throwing curveball after curveball.

Tara Ingalls [00:46:00]:
Okay.

James [00:46:01]:
And it pumped out stuff, and I was like, okay. It pumped out stuff, which was actually kinda funny. It wasn’t bad Yeah. As Taylor Swift songs go. Not not too deep. Anyways,

Tara Ingalls [00:46:15]:
so my no. I’m just I have

James [00:46:17]:
no problem with Taylor Swift. Right? I’m just saying, like, most songs, they’re they’re really not that deep. Right? Anyways, you gotta do whatever you gotta do in Yeah. In things that rhyme. So For

Tara Ingalls [00:46:26]:
entertainment, for sure.

James [00:46:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I’m like, this bot or this little AI prog program had to go somewhere to get if thens

Tara Ingalls [00:46:38]:
Mhmm.

James [00:46:38]:
And then probably had to go to Taylor Swift songs.

Tara Ingalls [00:46:40]:
Yeah. Probably right prior years.

James [00:46:42]:
I don’t know. Maybe Taylor does Taylor Swift write her own songs? I don’t know. No. Okay. So Taylor Swift wrote these songs or whoever did or writer did, whatever. Somebody wrote those songs

Tara Ingalls [00:46:51]:
Right.

James [00:46:51]:
That this program then used to come up with other lyrics.

Tara Ingalls [00:46:54]:
Yeah.

James [00:46:54]:
And that initial person or people aren’t being compensated in any way.

Tara Ingalls [00:46:58]:
Yeah. That way. Yeah. Mhmm.

James [00:47:00]:
So how’s that gonna work out when someone’s like, create me a logo? Great. It’s not creating a logo from scratch. No. It’s creating it by looking at a bunch of other logos that were designed by other people

Tara Ingalls [00:47:08]:
Yep.

James [00:47:09]:
That aren’t being compensated.

Tara Ingalls [00:47:10]:
Yep. So that’s that is that is something where somebody provided me with a logo that was AI generated, and I took the iconic so the there was the icon on the top and then the text underneath. I took the icon and took it took the text off and just took the icon and did a reverse Google image lookup, and there were 4 other companies at the same icon.

James [00:47:32]:
Oh, nice.

Tara Ingalls [00:47:33]:
So you do have to be really careful. And even websites like Fiverr or, you know, these companies where they crowdsource logo design, they’re just taking the same logo icon and putting your business name on the bottom of it. Like, they don’t care at all that they did that to the other 4 plumbers that they had given logos for. So you just said be careful to do that if you’re gonna crowdsource your branding. It’s just can it can really nip you if, you know, if even if you design it similarly to something that came up on AI. I mean, at Tangles, our logo design process starts with paper and we’re literally sketching on paper

James [00:48:06]:
Mhmm.

Tara Ingalls [00:48:07]:
To try to and, of course, like, your subconscious is gonna come up with things that maybe you saw somewhere. But if a client gets down to, like, 2 or 3 logos and they’re like, oh, I can’t decide or I can’t decide between we’re gonna run them all through Google Lookup just to make sure that they don’t accidentally look like something else before we finalize that logo. Because it’s just it’s inevitable that your brain stores pictures of you know, and it it might be a pizza place and a massage parlor that you’re you know, that you saw the pizza place place logo, and they were like, I really want a pizza in my massage parlor logo or whatever, massage logo. And you just think about it or, you know, so I think it’s important to just because there’s the Internet has that ability for you to do that. But AI is pulling from all those Google images, all of those icons, all of those different even if you prompt it to say not to do that, it’s coming from somewhere.

James [00:48:55]:
Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:48:55]:
Otherwise drawing it from somewhere. Yeah.

James [00:48:57]:
Right. Create this out of nothing? Like Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:48:58]:
I mean, it is it is magic. I don’t I

James [00:49:00]:
don’t know. Interesting point where we are essentially doing the same thing.

Tara Ingalls [00:49:04]:
To do what?

James [00:49:05]:
So when we’re when we’re writing or creating the logo or something like that, we’re working from memories that we have or experiences.

Tara Ingalls [00:49:11]:
So Right. Right.

James [00:49:12]:
That oh, that just got murkier, and I’m sorry you’re a mess.

Tara Ingalls [00:49:16]:
Yeah. Interesting. I don’t know. I mean, everybody has precons. They everyone’s raised differently. Everyone sees different things. So I mean, that’s one of the things I love most about having multiple designers on my team because so many people come with different backgrounds and different, not only just illustration backgrounds, but some of them are photographers. Some of them are pottery.

Tara Ingalls [00:49:37]:
They do pottery. Some of them are painters, you know, and having these different disciplines in the creative fields, like, just makes them a better graphic designer.

James [00:49:44]:
Nice.

Tara Ingalls [00:49:45]:
From that standpoint. We have a book in our office that one of our designers just got for a birthday gift. It’s menu design from, like, the 1800 in Europe. Wow. It is the coolest yeah. It’s the coolest book. It’s, like, this big And it’s, like, all of these were hand painted menus from Europe. And it’s just, like, a really neat thing to look at to be inspired by.

Tara Ingalls [00:50:07]:
You know? And it’s, like, who would think to look at that? But there’s, like, illustrations in there and, you know, hand typography and hand lettering, which we’re really into at Tingles right now. And

James [00:50:16]:
So some waiter waitress had to copy those and then, like, we’re out of soup.

Tara Ingalls [00:50:20]:
Yep. Let’s put some spaghetti sauce on that. Yeah. I mean, the way that that was done back then, I mean, everything was hand done and it was I don’t know. We just we just had tingles like this just kind of in our blood to to, like, do things by hand and have, like, this very organic nature to it. That’s why our designs look very different from each other.

James [00:50:38]:
I get that. I get that. When I went to school for graphic design I know. I was always you always start out with I think I was taught to do a grid of 50, and you had to come up with 50 rough logo ideas.

Tara Ingalls [00:50:50]:
Oh my gosh. And then sounds like a lot of pressure. We don’t come up with that many.

James [00:50:53]:
Yeah. It was. You mean

Tara Ingalls [00:50:55]:
if it wasn’t sketches?

James [00:50:56]:
Find there was ballpark Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:50:58]:
Ball like like concepts, like ideas. Yeah.

James [00:51:00]:
It was, like, take 20 seconds on each one kind of thing.

Tara Ingalls [00:51:03]:
Yes.

James [00:51:03]:
And some you’re just like smiley face, film the square kind of thing. And others you’re like, I like what I did there.

Tara Ingalls [00:51:08]:
And Yeah.

James [00:51:09]:
It was it was a brainstorming thing.

Tara Ingalls [00:51:10]:
Yeah. Brainstorm. Yep.

James [00:51:12]:
Flowing.

Tara Ingalls [00:51:12]:
That’s why we that’s why we sit down and do that first away from technology, away from distractions. Mhmm. Yeah. So we’ve always done it that way and it’s, you know, sometimes when we have lots of designers, it’s it’s just like crazy how some designers will come up with the exact same concept. Oh. That that mean that’s rare, but it’s like, you know, know, we’ll look at them. We’re like, oh my god. I have the same concept.

Tara Ingalls [00:51:34]:
So we know that that might be a good concept if multiple designers came up with it. You

James [00:51:38]:
have Lionel Richie playing in the background and they come

Tara Ingalls [00:51:40]:
up with the

James [00:51:41]:
dancing on the ceiling all over

Tara Ingalls [00:51:42]:
the place. Hey. We always have some music. Yeah.

James [00:51:45]:
Alright. No. Yeah. Nice. So how do you find a good designer for as an employee?

Tara Ingalls [00:51:52]:
So we have an internship program at Tingles that’s a hands on 3 month, program. They come in for about 20 hours a week. And we try to pair them with a non profit or a startup so that during the course of these 3 months, they can do a logo, sales collateral website, social media setup, whatever it is that that company needs so that they can then take that full suite and put in their portfolio, either for graduation. Oh, nice. They have to be in their last semester or they have to be recently graduated. But it’s an opportunity then for them to get a full suite of for a company that usually is picked by me to be, like, something that’s deficient in their portfolio, something that they don’t already have, something that’s different, something that will challenge them. And then they also get to do printer tours and all Tingles client work and they get to be part of our team and things like that. So that’s and most of those designers lately have been coming from Madison College.

Tara Ingalls [00:52:44]:
They have a phenomenal design program there.

James [00:52:46]:
Really? Mhmm.

Tara Ingalls [00:52:46]:
Both of my designers that I have right now are both from Madison College.

James [00:52:49]:
Oh, that’s cool.

Tara Ingalls [00:52:50]:
Beautiful hands on program. They bring in clients to do, real world work. They’re very, like, they’re they’re very, grounded in that they have faster turnaround than most of the other schools. Like, someone like, I have a I have a whole semester to do a logo. No. You have 5 hours at Tangles to do a logo. So they’re more like grounded and that they understand like turnaround and expectations and stuff like that. So yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:53:15]:
So we don’t have an intern right now. We usually don’t during the holidays but we’ll be accepting applications for January, February, March internship in December.

James [00:53:22]:
Yeah. That’s where they come from. It’s so cool you mentioned the portfolio thing. Because I remember trying to get a job as a graphic designer.

Tara Ingalls [00:53:28]:
Portfolio. Now it only has websites. Yeah.

James [00:53:31]:
I think I just recently tossed it, but I remember looking at it, I don’t know, within the past couple of years.

Tara Ingalls [00:53:36]:
Mine got damaged. It was it got our storage room got flooded and all of my original designations

James [00:53:41]:
were damaged.

Tara Ingalls [00:53:41]:
And, you know, of course, I was like, uh-oh. Like, my baby. And then I was like, crap. Crap. It’s all crap. I was gonna call bad. But, you know, I brought it we did a portfolio day where everybody in the in my company brought their portfolio in, and we all just kinda looked at each other’s original scores.

James [00:53:59]:
It was really fired. Get out.

Tara Ingalls [00:54:00]:
And I was like, no. I was like, please don’t look at mine. And they’re like, we wanna see where Tingle started. And I’m like, okay. So, you know, you’re looking at this. And I’m like, how did I get this business off the ground?

James [00:54:09]:
What did

Tara Ingalls [00:54:09]:
this crap? He went, no. It was it was fine work. It just was not I was not I did not have the training. I’m self taught. So I didn’t have the training that my designers have with Illustrator and all this kind of other stuff. So, you know, it just wasn’t as polished. But I’ll tell you, and they will probably laugh if they hear this. I can always tell if it’s not centered.

Tara Ingalls [00:54:30]:
Oh. Oh, nice. So because it’s just the eye that I had working at WPS before I started Tingles where it was just like, all I did was forums. Forms and brochures and print and, but I have an eye for if if things are centered or not.

James [00:54:43]:
They gotta pixel off and you’re like

Tara Ingalls [00:54:45]:
Maybe not a pixel, but I can tell that. And they’ll always just be like, make sure it’s center, Kelly.

James [00:54:50]:
It’s like, I

Tara Ingalls [00:54:51]:
can tell. I can tell.

James [00:54:53]:
That is awesome.

Tara Ingalls [00:54:53]:
It’s that eye after 25 years.

James [00:54:55]:
That’s good.

Tara Ingalls [00:54:56]:
Yeah. It’s a great program. It’s the program that I was looking for after I graduated college, that could never find. But Alright. It’s really fun. It’s pretty it’s pretty competitive.

James [00:55:07]:
The jobs

Tara Ingalls [00:55:08]:
are? It’s competitive to get into this program. Like, I’ll get probably 5, 10 applications from graduating class to

James [00:55:17]:
do the

Tara Ingalls [00:55:17]:
internship because it’s paid too. Alright. And that’s really rare to find a paid internship. Yeah. Yeah. Our current intern that was in our prior is finishing her degree. And then we’re probably gonna bring her back, for a little bit longer because, she just couldn’t do it all and go to school and be in the internship at the same time.

James [00:55:33]:
Tell me about personality of employees because I imagine that’s a big deal especially for something like this where you’re

Tara Ingalls [00:55:37]:
creating it. Yeah. The smaller so my team is very small right now and to bring on anybody is a risk, you know, from a culture. We have a very good relationship with the 3 of us that we have right now. And we’re looking for somebody that’s super light hearted, that is doesn’t take themselves seriously, that’s, you know, willing to grow in this profession and take constructive criticism and do some grunt work. You know, I mean, everybody in our office does grunt work. We don’t just say, hey, you’re the designer. You’re the intern.

Tara Ingalls [00:56:05]:
Go make coffee.

James [00:56:06]:
But okay. You’re not saying digging ditches or anything.

Tara Ingalls [00:56:09]:
No. No. I mean, they come in and they’re like the thing I hear the most in our internship was holy I did not expect to be doing that much work. Like, I come in as Design work. Yeah. Like, I just throw them to the wolves. Like, if you don’t if you can’t come in, you

James [00:56:21]:
can’t to heat a seat though.

Tara Ingalls [00:56:22]:
No. Right. And a lot of people are like, oh my gosh. Like, I didn’t expect and so they have to be very organized. They don’t have to prioritize their design work. They know, you know, work in a team setting but also be very self motivated I need. But yeah, I mean, I’m quirky. You know, I am I had bunny ears on before I came in today because it’s Halloween spirit week.

Tara Ingalls [00:56:41]:
Mom. I know it’s Halloween spirit week at Tingle. So today is pun day and I was, don’t worry was on my shirt and then I had ear, don’t worry, be hoppy. So, you know, and then we have like desk decorating competitions in December. And, You know, we’re in a new space now. So I don’t know what that’s gonna look like in the holidays now. But yeah, we go for walks and I bring in treats and I just I’m I’m like a different I’m a different kind of boss. So you you if you’re looking for a lot of structure, don’t come work for Tingles.

James [00:57:11]:
So is it challenging to be kind of the cool boss as well as introduce discipline when it’s necessary?

Tara Ingalls [00:57:17]:
I mean one of my designers has been with me for 11 years, the other one for 6. That’s Wow. You know, those 2 design they’re very loyal to the they’re very excited about this rebrand that we’re doing. They work really well together. They wanna work. I mean, I don’t do, I don’t do, reviews with my staff

James [00:57:36]:
Okay.

Tara Ingalls [00:57:36]:
Ever. I hate it and Mhmm. It’s awful. And when I did it at WPS, I would leave crying and I think I have PTSD from that. And so I just don’t do them.

James [00:57:44]:
The HR meeting with the Kleenex box?

Tara Ingalls [00:57:46]:
Yeah. It was. I would cry every time. And I’ll be like, really? I got a 5¢ raise? That’s what? So I just give raises when I wanna give raises and I give bonuses when I wanna give bonuses. I give PTO when I wanna give PTO. So it’s just, it’s a very different kind of managing. And I’ve had people leave because I’m not the manager that they need. Oh.

Tara Ingalls [00:58:04]:
And that’s fine with me. Okay. You know, I had I had somebody leave during COVID because I was more concerned about people’s well-being than I was about getting business done. Like, I wasn’t like, how many hours did you bill today? I was like, how are you doing? Like, is your son driving you crazy because he’s, you know, middle schooler and running around the house? And she was just like, you know, she just said that she was more concerned about, you know, that I was more concerned about that. And then, like, I was really taken aback by that. And I’m like, crap. Maybe I should be. Like, no.

Tara Ingalls [00:58:36]:
Like

James [00:58:36]:
Right.

Tara Ingalls [00:58:37]:
If I want this team to survive through this and we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the end, why in the world would I care more about productivity than and, honestly, we were more productive in COVID because of that, I think. Because I gave them time off to process things or work at night because they had to homeschool or whatever it was. And it was just sort of like, bye bye. Like, I really didn’t care about that, client or that employee leaving and she just wasn’t the right fit

James [00:59:04]:
Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:59:04]:
In our culture at all.

James [00:59:05]:
It’s your business. You get to choose the culture.

Tara Ingalls [00:59:07]:
I do get to choose and I Or

James [00:59:09]:
try to define it anyways. Yeah.

Tara Ingalls [00:59:10]:
And I don’t want people shoulding on me because, like, I’ll run my business however I want. Mhmm. And the minute that people start saying you should be this by now or you should be running this or, you know, whatever. If my employees want something, they’re gonna come to me for it, and ask or they should know they can if, you know, if they don’t already.

James [00:59:28]:
Fair. I like it. Yeah. Tara, thank you so much for being on the show. You’re welcome. Where can people find you?

Tara Ingalls [00:59:34]:
Tingalls.com. Tingalls.com. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. We have a YouTube channel, but it’s not nearly as great as his. Alright. Go to tingles.com.

James [00:59:48]:
That bar is pretty low.

Tara Ingalls [00:59:49]:
I know. I really love it.

James [00:59:50]:
We’re cool. We’re cool. I appreciate that.

Tara Ingalls [00:59:52]:
You make it easy.

James [00:59:53]:
I try. I got awesome guests, that makes it easier.

Tara Ingalls [00:59:56]:
Yeah. I can’t believe I’m 3rd time.

James [00:59:58]:
3 times. This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. We’re locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. Calls On Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country on the web at callsoncall.com. And of course, The Bold Business Book, a book of the entrepreneur in all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guest, Tara Ingalls. Website one more time?

Tara Ingalls [01:00:30]:
Tingles.com. Easy

James [01:00:32]:
enough. Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night at the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.