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Episode 002. Have you taken full advantage of “content marketing” to both educate your crowd and prepare them to buy?
Greg Key discusses how Hoss Tools (http://hosstools.com) uses a combination of superior customer service and content marketing to bring people to gardening tool website.
- Hoss Wheel Hoes – https://hosstools.com/product-category/wheel-hoes/
- Premium Garden Seeds – https://hosstools.com/premium-garden-seeds/
- Hoss Tools YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZnfO4fIz4ThYKHwB7t4NWw
Amazon-Proof Your Website! http://brianjpombo.com/amazon/
Full Transcript
Intro: Welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, a place for conversations about out of the box businesses with heavy e-commerce elements. I’m Brian Pombo.
When thinking about your business or project, what do you think about when I say phrases like customer service, ideal customer profile and content marketing?
I know these are kind of dry and they’re overused so often cliches in the industry, but today’s conversation is going to uncover how to bring these concepts into actual real life for your business and how you can profit from them.
Here’s our very first conversation for this podcast and if you stay until the very end, I’m going to go over some of my takeaways from it. Listen to this….
If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family, if you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing, you may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.
This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.
Brian: Greg Key is the owner of Hoss Tools.
Born and raised in South Georgia. Greg has been involved with agriculture and horticulture for over 30 years. He’s witnessed how food was grown years ago on a small family farm all the way to the huge corporations that dominate agriculture today.
Being a big believer in clean, healthy food, Greg started Hoss Tools to help people grow their own food with quality tools and supplies. He enjoys growing food sustainably on a 10 acre homestead with his wife of 34 years.
Two dogs, eight chickens, two horses and one jackass.
Preserving the harvest, making wine and enjoying his four children keeps them busy.
Greg: Grandchildren.
Brian: Sorry, four grandchildren.
Appreciate you coming on the show. Greg, welcome.
Greg: Well, thank you. Glad to be here, Brian.
Brian: Yeah, this is really great. Why don’t you give everyone an idea of what it is that you do?
Greg: About nine years ago, we started a company called Hoss Tools. And our goal is to give people the tools and information for them to be successful and grow their own food.
Brain: That’s great. How’d you get started in all of this?
Greg: Back in the early two thousands we’ve kind of seen the trend were a lot of products being imported in here.
They were being sold, but they were not being supported. So if you went about a product and it tore up, you simply threw it away and went and bought another product. And the quality of the garden tools we seen was on the demise.
I thought, you know, there’s gotta be a better way.
What we decided to do was start a company, manufacture as much product as we could in USA and make a jam-up quality product and support it. There’s nothing I hate more than to call a company and get a recording.
So when you call Hoss Tools, you get somebody that answers the phone and we’re going to be here to help you. We’re going to support you, we’re going to do whatever it takes for you to be successful using our tools and our supplies. Quality tools, quality customer service.
Brian: That sounds great.
You guys have so many things on your site right now. You’ve got your wheel hoe. One of the signature things you guys have cedar shovels, spades, forks, man tools of every kind of machetes, knives, axes, raised garden bed kits, irrigation equipment, pest control, fertilizers, food preservation tools, whether you’re fermenting or pickling.
I mean a lot of great stuff on there.
Out of all that stuff, what would you say is your top selling product?
Greg: Well, the first product that we ever started with was the wheel hoe and that continues to be a number one seller.
However, every product that you see on our site, which is around 300 and we’re in the process now adding several more. We have tested and we have looked at and we’ve made sure it’s good quality product. So we’re familiar with everything we say, we can tell you everything about it and we support it.
However, the wheel hose continues to be our number one seller.
Brian: Is it the single wheel that sells the most or the double wheel or a little bit of both of them?
Greg: About half and half.
We sell about equal amounts of each one.
Brian: One of the main ways that I found you guys, I was searching for these types of markets, but the thing that stood out to me about Hoss Tools was the amount of information that you all have out there, especially if you just go through your YouTube channel and look at all the videos you have.
And these are videos folks that are just commercials selling their products. They’re going deep into the personal knowledge that they have in gardening with these tools. They go into specifics on different vegetables.
I just have to ask you, there’s a lot of our audience are going to be preppers and so forth.
The homesteaders and what would you say are the foods that can grow with the least amount of refrigeration or no refrigeration afterwards.
What are the foods that are going to last?
Greg: You get the foods that we all love, that sweet corn and things like that that we love them. The fact is that didn’t have much of a shelf life and I’m a big believer in growing your own foods and you get to have the staples that will last.
Some of the things that we have tested, that we’ve grown, that we’d get pretty good at is those vegetables that last.
To give you an example, the winter squash, the pumpkins, which could easily fall into winter squash category, sweet potatoes and onions, leeks, guards, all those really store well and they store well without refrigeration.
So those are a lot of the things we love to grow that we can put up and we can store it and we could eat them all winter long.
I feel like a lot of people out there, we’re missing the boat on these great crops that can give you a food source without refrigeration.
You know, I live in South Georgia and we had a major hurricane Michael, that knocked us out of power for seven days.
We could go out there to the garden shed, where we had our vegetables stored up and we could get onions, we cold get garlic, we could get sweet potatos, we can get winter squash. And we can go fire the gas grill up and we can have a meal.
Not only that, but I mean it’s just a good way to prepare yourself to have that skill set to grow those vegetables that will last for a long time.
And also prepared. I mean we do a lot of canning, we do a lot of things like that around here. Having that skill set to do that. So these foods store, so you can have a food source during the winter time or heaven forbid something happened.
You could have this food source when you don’t have electricity.
Brian: Yeah, that’s great info. we’ll get more into what you guys do on your YouTube channel and so forth through your videos later.
Who would you say is your ideal customer? What’s their mindset? Where are they coming from?
Greg: Well, let me put it this way. Let me tell you who our customer is because ideally who our ideal customer is, they are 85% male and they seem to be anywhere from the 25 to, you know, 70, 80 year old.
We have some 80 something year olds who call in every night. However, we have to treat that older group a little different than we do the millennials, the younger group.
What we find is the younger customers we have are starving for information.
They don’t know how to do this and how to do that.
So we’re tried to put the content out there to give them the information they need to be able to use our tools and supplies.
However, that older group recognizes a good tool or supply and they simply just want to call and buy.
So we don’t have to do as much is education with the older group as we do with the young group.
What I have found about the millennials out there is they’re starving for information. They’re starving to learn things that they can’t find anywhere. And that’s where our YouTube channel comes in.
We’ve been so effective there and it’s just an amazing thing to me to see these young people out there want to learn and have these skillsets that have been lost through generations.
Brian: Absolutely. That makes a whole lot of sense. Because I mean, just when I was going to high school 20 years back and I took ag classes and everything and we learned a little bit, but they don’t really teach you the down and dirty of how to grow, just what you guys are teaching on your channel.
I learned so much just by sitting there and watching it or listening to your podcasts.
That’s really good info.
So you’re saying by going out there and teaching this, you’re also bringing in customers that way without you even doing a hard sell, they’re coming back your direction and buying the product.
Greg: Yeah. We don’t believe in the hard sale and we do some, I guess you could classify it as the soft sale, but we rather refer to it as content marketing. Putting content out there, show people what they can do with our products and if it fits what they need and they can come buy. That’s exactly what we try to do.
That’s been our strategy from day one is to do content marketing and do a great job at it.
Brian: Oh, that’s a great point. What do you like most about this business in this industry?
Greg: What I like most about it is my customers are exactly like I am.
I’ve been in a few businesses before in my life where I had to deal with the very wealthy people being in agriculture and horticulture from early days and it was very profitable. But people that are consumed with the way they are, they’re very rich and they are very consumable people, and that’s not who I am and I don’t like hanging out with those kind of people.
The customers that I have today, at Hoss Tools, is exactly who I am.
What I say is, they’re my kind of people and that’s what I love about this business here is I’m doing people that have the same interests that I do and have the same passions and that makes it all worthwhile.
Brian: Absolutely.
What would be your biggest gripes with your business or your industry?
Greg: Well, you know, we’re going through a lot of consolidations now.
Back 15, 20 years ago, you’d see a lot of mom and pop stores on the internet, they were selling things that they had. Those days are gone by the wayside.
Amazon has took a lot of the mom and pops and pushed him out of the way, and it’s the way of life and it’s something that we’re going to have to adjust to, and I understand it’s a natural progression.
However, it does bother me a little bit, that Amazon has taken so much of the marketplace out there and snuffed the mom and pop out a little bit and it’s changed the way that we do business.
However, like I said earlier, that’s just a natural progression of things, we just have to learn to deal with.
Brian: Absolutely.
Commercial Break – Okay. I’m going to jump in and interrupt the conversation I had with Greg, he was just talking about Amazon.com and if you’re running an eCommerce platform, chances are you have some opinions about Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos.
Now you may see him as the devil and Amazon.com as an absolute apocalypse on the e-commerce community. You may see Amazon as being helpful.
Either way, no one can deny that Amazon.com has had an impact on the industry as a whole when talking to owners and executives of eCommerce companies.
One of the most common issues I see over and over again is them asking how do we handle Amazon?
Do we work with them?
Do we work against them?
Do we try to get around them?
They certainly can’t be ignored, at least in most industries, so I actually developed a technique that I can walk you through in a little thing I call a strategy session. We can do it over the phone or we do it over video chat and I would be able to take your specific company and customize a solution to help Amazon-Proof your website.
If you’re interested in Amazon proofing your website, go to BrianJPombo.com/Amazon and that will take you to the Amazon proof my website strategy session.
Now, normally I charge $600 for this one hour session.
There’s no doubt that $600 is a great deal for what you’re getting back from this, but since I’m trying to test out podcasting and see what our reach is, if you add in the coupon code podzeroone, P O D zero one you will be discounted all the way down to $60 I’m going to take a zero right off the end.
You will only pay $60 for an hour long strategy session.
This is not a sales call. I’m not trying to rope you into anything else. If there’s something I can help you with beyond that, we can discuss that later.
Within that hour though, we’re going to talk about actual solutions, actual strategies that your company can take to make your website Amazon-Poof, to make it to where Amazon is no longer a major competitive force against you, that you can actually work around Amazon.
It will no longer be a detriment to your company.
So like I said, BrianJPombo.com/Amazon. And now back to the conversation with Greg.
Brian: Where are you finding new customers at besides this media that you’re putting out there? Where else are you finding customers?
Greg: Well, Facebook, I mean we do a little bit on Facebook. YouTube is our biggest driver.
Facebook is entirely different than YouTube is and you’ve got to treat them differently.
We do some lead generation through Facebook. However, you got to be real careful with your content, because our content doesn’t do as well on Facebook as it does on YouTube.
But it is a good start place to plant that seed and then move them over to YouTube.
If you noticed your friends and everything is big in the Facebook, they have these real social personalities. It’s a social platform. It’s where you can go and relax, look at your cousins pictures, look at their babies, you know, catch up on things.
But you don’t go to Facebook to learn anything. You go to YouTube to learn something.
You go to YouTube to learn instructional stuff.
If you’ve got a question about a product where you will review your product or a way of life, you go to YouTube to search so that you don’t do it on Facebook.
So you have to create, you know, you have to treat those two mediums completely different. But we have been successful in doing some lead generation on Facebook.
Brian: Any other places or is that your main places where you’re getting customers right now?
Greg: Yeah, it is. I mean, Instagram’s up growing.
A lot of people I talked to are doing extremely well on Instagram. I do not know much about Instagram, but I would look in Instagram very hard.
The top three I think right now is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. YouTube probably being at the top of that list, it drives probably around 30 to 40% of our business, YouTube does.
Brian: I can see videos going back to 2012 on there. You have over 19,000 subscribers on there.
Your Row by Row Garden Show, with you and Travis hosting. For those of you who don’t know, go and check them out on YouTube Hoss Tools and you can see Greg and Travis there and they’ll sit there and they’ll talk and they go through all these different items talking about growing specific vegetables and so forth and what they’re doing and what they’re dealing with during that season.
It’s really interesting because they can take a show that’s so simple with just the camera sitting there and then at the same time you guys also have the podcast, which is just the audio of you talking available over on iTunes and other places so you can check them out there too.
Do you find that the customers that are coming to you are more educated in general by the time they get to you if they’ve been watching your YouTube videos and so forth, are they coming with more educated questions and so forth?
Greg: Absolutely. And another thing too we get there are Row by Row Garden Shows, we also have a Row by Row Facebook group. If they’re really a Facebook person, they can watch it on Facebook. We have the two different channels or they can watch on Facebook or they can watch it over on YouTube.
However, YouTube seems to be the best driver with a medium there.
So let me explain to you what we try to do with our YouTube channel with our products. Now we encourage other business to do the same thing. Go to your customer service. The person answers the phone at your business every day and talks to front person the phone that talks to the customer. Let them wright down the top five questions that they get, whether it be product, whether it be store hours, whatever it be, the top five main concerns that she or he answers on an everyday basis.
That’s the first thing you do is you make a video that’s addressing those pain points.
So you take those five and this gives you a start and you take those five and you make a video address needs. What you have done is you mentioned that question for that customer and you’ve made it easy for that customer to get an answer and you’ve took that burden off your customer service.
That’s the first one you do.
Then after you do that, then you can move it into more of the soft sale content marketing.
Brian: That’s great advice.
If we were to talk again like a year from now, what would have had to have happened over the last 12 months for you to feel happy with the progress concerning your business?
Greg: Well, we’re in the garden industry and what we found in garden industries, when the stock market is doing well and when the economy’s doing good, we have less people gardening.
We’re kind of in the mood right now, we’re satisfied with a decent percent amount of growth. We’ve grown every year and we continue to see that.
We don’t want to grow a lot because we can’t handle that. We won’t have steady growth every year. And we thought we’re going to experience that. Even with good of commerce.
We are adding a seed line for this coming year and it’s a pretty big ever for us and we’re adding 120 to a 230 different varieties come spring time.
It’s going to be interesting to see how that happens. We’re going to back these varieties up with the support that we’ve grown.
We’ve looked at them and we know these are good varieties, see business as competitive business. So we got to be on our game to be here and be upsale seeds and we’ve got to give people a compelling reason to buy from us.
And so a year from now when we talk, I hope you asked me, was the seed business a good decision to make a fabulous going into a whole new line.
Brian: What are the main obstacles do you see standing in your way from getting to where you want to get with seeds within a year?
Greg: Oh, just let getting the word out there. You’re like, I’m not going to sit around and give people a compelling reason, because you know, everybody’s selling seeds. But giving people a compelling reason to know why they should come to us.
Thousands of dollars to put in a cloud control warehouse so we can control the temperature of the humidity so that our seeds germination will hold up better.
We’re going to do pack to order. So if somebody wants a pound they can call in and we’ll pack that up and send it to them.
We’re real proud of the fact we get most of the orders up the sameday.
What we have to do is convey all those points, that I just mentioned, all the way to the customer and make them understand, wow, they should buy from us. And if we can do that, then I think we will be successful.
Brian: Awesome. Greg, this has been a great talk, a great look into your industry and where you’ve come from on this.
It’s really, really interesting.
Let’s say someone’s brand new to Hoss Tools. What could a listener do?
What would you recommend them do if they’re interested in finding out more about your products?
Greg: Oh, absolutely. Go to our YouTube channel Hoss Tools. Join our Facebook group Row by Row.
What we have found, our Facebook group is we’re pretty knowledgeable about what we do. There’s a lot of people that we have that we’ve sold to that we’ve interacted with it are part of our Facebook group.
They can answer a lot of garden questions, so if you have a problem with any type of garden or you’ve got a question posted there on the Facebook group, if we don’t answer it, some the rest of them chime in there and maybe give a look different opinions.
That’s the great part of the group is the interaction.
If Simply got a question about products, or about our company, you can go to YouTube and we’ve got close to 200 different video. So you could find the answer there somewhere.
Brian: Greg Key from Hoss Tools. Appreciate you coming on the show, thank you.
Greg: Thank you.
Brian’s Commentary: Wow, that was a really good conversation.
In a short period of time, Greg went over a lot of ideas that I’d like to go back and put a little final point on.
First off when he’s discussing his concept of an ideal customer target market. The one of the first things he points out is it’s people that are looking to grow their own food.
Well, that’s a very clear idea and when he gets into the demographics of 85% ages 25 to 80 and talking about the difference between the younger customer and the older customer, the younger customer being starved for information, which is where their content marketing comes into play.
And if you look at what he’s doing for content marketing and why having a huge focus on their YouTube, and this isn’t necessarily something that you would want to do to focus primarily on video, you have to look at your market, look at what you have the ability to do and what you think you’d work out best at, but focus on it once you find your form of content marketing.
Nothing works greater than having content marketing that educates, entertains and drives traffic back to your website.
Look at what he’s doing with YouTube.
They have regular shows, they have personalities on there. They’re actually discussing the thing that the person wants to do, which is grow their own food and discussing everything around that. They’re not just promoting a product, they’re not just promoting their tools or their upcoming seed line.
They’re discussing everything around it, making it entertaining, informational that helps relate with people and actually starts driving people back to your website.
Eventually they become customers, but in the meantime, in the very beginning, they’re getting to know, like and trust you. This is a term that comes from old times sales people that know you, like you and trust your ones that are going to do business with you.
Not just once, but ongoing.
Also the fact that he defined his customer as my customers are exactly like I am. My type of people, my kind of people, and I’d like to point out if you hate your customers or your clientele, you’re going to be in big trouble.
If you’ll look at the fact that he relates so much with his customers that he believes he knows what they’re looking for and he talks with his customers both via social media and via customer service line and the people that are running customer service.
His focus on ideal customer service on actually having a live person who could answer the phone, someone they’re local that they can discuss with. Relating that back to the content marketing, so creating content based on the most common questions that you get back.
That is such a huge service that you could provide and that step will make you more relatable back to your customer base. It becomes a virtuous loop where you get to know your customers better, you serve them better, you answer their questions before they actually post them and it makes your whole process work 10 times more effective.
Also, Greg has a very clear understanding of the flow of the customers, so he knows that if he’s meeting them on Facebook, he wants to bring them over to YouTube and educate them a little more and from there eventually get them to the website.
The speed of getting someone to purchase does not necessarily mean that they’re going to purchase ongoing, but that relationship, building the relationship via your content is what’s going to grow things long-term.
Finally, the question that he put out asking, what do my customers need?
What does my market need?
And going back to them and finding out what they’re looking for, more of, led them to developing a new seed line and actually start producing seeds or delivering seeds to the market.
This is the Disney model. If you watch what the Disney corporation has done, they go back and they look at, okay, what do they need next?
Disney starts off with babies. You see Minnie mouse on the diapers, you see all these characters being introduced as early as possible, and then they take them the next step.
Okay, what is the next thing?
The next age group, what are they looking for?
They have an entire channel playing to preschoolers with all the characters. They have toys associated with them every step of the way throughout your entire life.
There’s a place for Disney that they’re producing content directly to you regardless of what age or gender you are.
If you could step back and look at your business and try to find a way to be able to speak directly to people ongoing in the same way and ask them really what do they need next? Okay.
Once they have the seeds, what do they need next?
What is the information that my market is asking for?
What are the visitors to my website looking for more of?
If you’re talking to them directly, like via live, over the phone, that makes a big difference.
If you’re talking via social media to your customer base, that’s going to help you out a whole lot. The whole idea is to really get inside your customer’s head and answer the questions they have before they even pose them.
I think this has been a great start for our podcast and where we’re going in the future. I think we’re going to be going more in depth into these concepts over time, so be sure and stay tuned.
Go and visit BrianJPombo.com to find out more about me and what I offer and come back for episode two.
We’ve got another great conversation coming right up.
Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.
That’s BrianJPombo.com.
If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor. Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas. I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.