0:04
Valerie Levin
Hi everyone and thank you for joining us. For the webinar how outreach can increase your inbound marketing results by 100% hosted by Trent Dersman. My name is Valerie Levin and I'm the Marketing Manager here at Oktopost. I'd like to take this opportunity to quickly run through today's agenda and some housekeeping rules. We're very fortunate to have Trent with us today and he's the founder of Groove Digital Marketing. Just a little bit about Groove. It's an inbound marketing agency that helps CMOs drive more interest from their best potential customers, and Groove also leverages its expertise in content marketing, social media, email marketing and automation to help companies find qualified leads. In this webinar, Trent's going to cover a number of very valuable and helpful topics, mostly pertaining to targeted outreach strategies and those include how to find contact details for the right person at any target company, how to write an email that will significantly increase your response rate, how to avoid the send me a proposal trap, and of course what to do instead, and how to develop a three step process to build trust and credibility. At the end of the session there's going to be a Q and A. So of course you'll have a chance to ask all of the questions that you have and we're also going to be using a hashtag throughout the webinar. If you want to comment or share quotes or just discuss what's going on, please use the hashtag. It's TargetOutreach. We're also going to be tweeting throughout the webinar and answering your comments and providing our feedback as well. In order to ensure that we'll hear all the presenters clearly, the conference line will be on mute throughout the presentation. Therefore, any questions that you have should be submitted via the questions panel which you can see on the bottom right hand side of your gotowebinar. If you have any problems asking questions or any technical difficulties, please let us know so that we'll help you out. At the end of the webinar, we'll of course convey all of the questions to Trent, who will hopefully be able to answer each and every one of them. As a reminder, we will be recording this webinar so don't worry. Each one of you will receive a link to the recording afterwards and we'll send it out to you by email in the coming days. I really hope that you're going to enjoy the webinar. We think that there's going to be some fantastic content and tips and best practices that Trent will share with you, and I'm going to pass it on to him right now.
2:30
Trent Dyrsmid
Thank you very much, Valerie. Good morning, everybody. Before we get into this, can everyone hear me? Okay? And I Valerie, you'll have to give me the feedback because of course, in the control panel, I can't see if people are raising their hands or not.
2:50
Valerie Levin
Yeah, I think everything. Valerie, sorry about that. I think everything's fine. We haven't seen any hands raised and we just got a response saying that everyone can hear you.
3:00
Trent Dyrsmid
All right, sounds good.
3:01
Valerie Levin
Okay, great.
3:02
Trent Dyrsmid
So thanks very much for the making some time. Join us for this webinar. I'm going to do my very best to make this as valuable for you as possible and ideally give you some takeaways that you can implement in your business, literally this afternoon if you choose to. So first of all, let's talk. Why are we here? Well, if you're not generating enough leads, you're going to find some solutions in this webinar. Or if you're having trouble getting the attention of your best prospects, then you're going to find some solutions in this webinar. If you're cold calling, if you're spinning your wheels cold calling, you're going to see how you can pretty much stop doing that. I don't make any cold calls to build my business. And if you feel like you don't have enough time to get it all done, I'm also going to show you how I have completely automated all of my prospecting. It's literally set it and forget it. Obviously, I had to build the campaigns to begin with, but now that they're built, I literally do not lift a finger each and every day. And obviously, most of us want to get results faster. And I'm going to do my best to show you how I am doing that. So this webinar, this isn't about theory. This is the exact stuff that I am doing to build my marketing agency, and it's working very, very well. So I want to talk a little bit, make sure that everybody understands the problem that we're tackling. We're going to talk a little bit about inbound marketing, and then we're going to talk a little bit about the results that we've been getting and how to get started, as well as to how to tie prospecting into your inbound marketing so you can get results faster. And then I'm going to talk about the tools and the resources that I use to get all that done. So I don't think it comes as any great surprise that Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, my goodness, I hope to get spammed today. Getting attention, never been harder. I've been in business. I started my first company back in 2001, and all we did back then was cold calling. It was really, really not very hard, to be honest with you. And the company ended up being ranked as one of the profit 100 fastest growing companies in Canada for a couple of years in a row. And then in 2007, I still owned that business back then. Growth had sort of slowed down. I kind of returned to my roots. I started cold calling again and it didn't work. Just did not work. And I kind of ran out of ideas. So I ended up selling that business and taking some time off and then eventually discovered how I market my business. Now, my new business which is with inbound marketing and a very specific style of prospecting that does not involve cold calling. So if you're having, as I mentioned earlier, if you're having trouble getting people's attention, fear not. I've got some very good suggestions for you. The reality is 95% of people don't like being interrupted. And, and the other 5% absolutely hate being interrupted. So if you are going to try and interrupt people, you better make sure that you're doing it with their interests in mind. And I'll explain more what I mean by that and how to do that as opposed to your own agenda. Because everybody's getting better at blocking out messages that they don't want to get. I unfollow people in Facebook who I'm not interested in hearing from. I unsubscribe from lists who send me content that is of no value to me. I simply don't visit websites that don't add value to my life. I don't answer the phone if I don't recognize the number on call display. And I'm sure that all of you guys are probably doing the same thing. But despite all of that, you still can get the attention of the people that you're trying to if you do it right. The other thing I want to talk about, if you're new to this whole idea of inbound marketing, it's very different than advertising. And we're going to talk very briefly about that. See, the problem with advertising is there's always going to be somebody who's got more money than you do, and they're going to be able to outspend you. So trying to outspend them is a loser's game. The other major problem with advertising, to get Your leads is you're not really doing, you're not, you're just renting the attention of your target audience as opposed to getting it in the long term. And we're going to show you how to get their attention in a longer term way. So while I'm really trying to, to say here is that ads are temporary, as soon as you stop paying the rent, you stop getting the attention. So that's not a good long term strategy. That's not going to help you to reduce the cost of acquiring a new customer and it's not going to help you to reduce the cost of acquiring a new lead. What I'm going to show you in the webinar will help you to reduce the costs of those things. And obviously that's going to have a huge benefit to your business. So the inbound nut marketing methodology is pretty simple. First of all, you want to attract strangers and get them to become visitors to your website and you want to do that with things that are interesting to them. Blogging is an excellent way to do that. Social media is also a very powerful tool. Once they come to your website, you want to make sure that you have calls to action and landing pages and free things that they can get so those visitors become leads. And then once they become leads, you need to make sure that you nurture them through a marketing funnel. And I'll explain how to do that in a little bit so that at some point they are nurtured towards the point of sale. So if you sell something online, the point of sale is when they punch in their credit card and they buy it. If you don't sell something online, if you're a consultant or you're a consulting business or a services business and they actually have to talk to your sales team, what I mean by nurturing them towards the point of sale is they raise their hand and they say, I want to talk to you. And I get this happening in my business fairly regularly. People come through my funnel or they just call me up because they've spent enough time on the site and they say, I want to talk to you. And those are the best leads because they're highly motivated, largely pre sold and you can close them more often than not. And then of course, once you get customers, you want to delight them so they become promoters. So one of the questions that I used to, before I knew anything about this stuff was, you know, how do I attract visitors? Well, Google, did you know there's 5.9 Google visits every or searches every day? I didn't either. I had to look it up. So do you think maybe just a few of those people would be interested in your product? Well, with 5.9 billion, I'd say that, yes, a few would. So here is your first big if you haven't taken any notes yet, write this one thing down, please. You want to build marketing assets that you own. So those assets, for the purposes of what we're talking about today, are content, blog posts, videos, white papers, podcasts, any type of asset or content asset that can live online and can live there for a long time. I'll tell you a quick little sidebar. I created a video that's on YouTube right now, and you can find it if you go to YouTube and type in how to Start a Business with no Money. I created that video three years ago. It's been watched around 900,000 times. And around three weeks ago, a guy by the name of Brian found it, watched it, bought one of my $50 products, liked the product so much that he called me up and he has now put us he's hired our marketing agency on a monthly retainer of $3,000 a month. That is by far the best story that I can think of recently of how long of a shelf life quality content can have and how much of a profound impact it can have on your business. Brian will probably remain a customer for a couple years, I would say. So he's what, paying us around $40,000 a year? So even if he only hangs around for two years, for making a video that took me 10 minutes to make, I made 80,000 bucks. So content really can have a huge impact on your business. Vote SEO. Don't worry about it too much these days. There used to be a whole bunch of clever tricks and stuff that you would do. We're not really going to talk about SEO, the only thing. And SEO experts like my friend Rand here will tell you that these tricks that people used to use, and I used to use them too, they can actually be very toxic. In our business today, we do not do any purposeful link building at all. All we worry about is on page optimization and 40% of our traffic comes from organic search. So really all we do is we just pick keywords and we target those keywords with the blog posts that we're writing. Here's big idea number two, and I say this, if you know a bit about content marketing, this is going to be old hat for you. If you're new to this, this might be new. And that's why I'm spending some time talking about it. A lot of companies that I see, they're blogging, but they're doing it wrong. They're blogging about themselves. We got a round of funding. We got a new office, we hired a new employee. Employee, key employee. We launched a new product. Us. Us. Us, us. Nobody wants to read that crap, people. And I'll go into more detail on this in a couple of slides. People are going to read your content. They're not interested in you. And if you're talking about you, they're just not going to pay attention. They're not going to hang around and they are going to tune you out. So you need to make your content relevant to their needs, their wants and their desires. And it's not very hard to do. And then when you do that, you will make humans happy. And when you make humans happy, simultaneously, you also make Google happy. So Top of Funnel is what we're really going to talk about here for the most part in this particular webinar. And then we're going to talk about some prospecting strategies on how you're going to use that Top of Funnel content. So Top of Funnel what I mean, blogging, web pages, social promotions, and to a certain degree, SEO, which are the byproduct of blogging. And it's incredibly important that you create your Top of Funnel content with your prospects in mind. So here we're going to spend a little bit of time over here because it's really important for you guys to understand this. And again, this is going to tie into the prospecting portion, which I'm going to talk about in the second half of the webinar. Your buyer's journey over here happens in three phases. There's the awareness phase, consideration phase, and the decision phase. And then you have content assets over here on the right and the automated sales process. I want you guys to make sure you really understand this. So when the buyer because it's all about the buyer, when they're in the awareness stage, let's use I was talk here in my town last night at the local sales and marketing executives group and there was a guy in the group who was a financial advisor. So we used him as an example. So we'll use him as an example again. When people are in the awareness stage, they're not thinking I need a new financial advisor. They're thinking my money is not earning a high enough rate of return or I have too much money sitting in the bank, or they're thinking my investments are not performing very well, or they're thinking my Tax bill is going to be too high. So I need to figure out how I might be able to use my investments in some way, shape or form to figure out how to reduce my tax burden. None of that thinking has anything to do with Guy's name was Jason. With Jason, his company, his services, his credentials, his track record, people don't care about that stuff. At the top of the funnel. At the top of the funnel, they're only looking for one thing, so answers to their questions. And by far the best way for you is to be able to give them answers to their questions is to make a list of all the questions. What I call the pre sales questions. Think of if you've been in your business for more than 10 minutes, you know all the, you know, you could probably come up with a list of 20 questions, maybe it's even 30 questions, maybe it's 40. But it's a, it's a relatively large number of questions that people ask you over and over and over before they buy whatever it is that you're selling. The easiest way to get started with inbound marketing is to make a list of those questions and then write one blog post that answers each question. So if you had 10 questions, you're going to write 10 blog posts. These are the easiest blog posts in the world to write because you are the subject matter expert, you already know the answers to those questions. And because of the way the Google search algorithm works now, which much more towards a natural language for the titles of those blog posts, you want to use natural, as close to natural language as you can to target the keyword, which is really just the question itself that you're going after. Now if you do that right over time, and this is exactly what has happened for us and for many other people, you'll have an increasingly large body of content. And each piece of content fetches some amount of traffic. So in aggregate you end up getting a lot of traffic. And, and if you put a offer for premium content at the bottom of every one of those blog posts. So let me just switch over to our website and I'll show you exactly what I mean. So. If you go to our blog and you pick any blog post, it doesn't really matter. So five creative ways to market beyond the app Exchange. So this is a perfect example of this blog post is targeted towards a specific niche that uses the Salesforce AppExchange. So they might be typing in, how do I market my business beyond the AppExchange? Some way, somehow they find this post, they come read it, it's not about us, it's not about our product, it's not about our service. It's intended to be genuinely helpful. At the very bottom of it is this thing called the call to action. This is how you capture leads from your blog folks. If you don't have a call to action, if you're not telling them what to do at the bottom of your blog post, the chances of them going to your contact form are remote. At best, approximately 0.4 to 0.5% of your total traffic might become a lead. If you take this approach and you blog consistently like we do, you'll end up with 2 to 3% of your total traffic converting into leads. So this is what we call a premium content offer. People click, click, this goes to a landing page. There's really only one thing to do. Fill in the information, get the ebook. So going back to this that's right here, a new lead is generated. And in the ebook I'm able to introduce my firm's positioning. Plus, I also know what additional questions that particular person is going to be asking. So I'm going to set up a series of automated emails with supporting content that is going to say once per week or maybe every couple of days, whatever you feel is right for your business is going to send that person, that new lead, another email with an answer to additional very commonly asked questions. And those are generally additional blog posts. And at the every one of those bottom of those blog posts is another call to action similar to the one I just showed you, only now because we're in the middle of the funnel, it's going to be, in our case, it's an ebook called what to Expect in a partnership with Groove Digital Marketing. So if somebody downloads that ebook, what does that tell me? It tells me that they're at the point where they're now looking at us as a potential solution provider for whatever problem that they have. So they've now entered the consideration stage. So they're considering doing business with us. They've moved from becoming aware they have a problem. Read some one or many of our blog posts, downloaded one or many of our reports are getting these emails and now they're like, I may be interested in this Groove company. Who are these guys? And as you might guess, when people are interested in you, they also might have some concerns. They also might have some objections. We know what those objections are. So we have another series of emails which is going to deal with those objections, send them to additional pieces of content with another call to action that Says, hey, would you like to have a free consultation or would you like to talk to one of our sales reps? We call that a bottom of funnel offer. And of course, when people fill that out, they end up scheduling an appointment and they talk to us. So in a nutshell, that is what you're trying. This is what I call your automated sales process. It's what companies do with sales reps if they don't have any of this stuff. But to do this all with sales reps is very, very expensive and it's very inefficient because generally speaking, if you don't have any content, nobody's going to be finding you. You're just going to be forced to interrupt them with cold calls or what have you on an ongoing basis. And as I mentioned earlier on, it really just doesn't work very well anymore. So does this stuff work? Yep, it works. Here's the report. So we started blogging back in March. In our first month, we got, I think it was about 1,800 visitors. And as you can see, traffic has steadily increased. The screenshot was taken before August was over. August actually finished about 2 or 3% higher than July. And so far in September, we're tracking even higher than we did in August. So if you produce quality content that's relevant to your audience, of course traffic's going to go up over time. You can see here we got lots of visits. Our organic was our number one source of traffic. And then referrals, social media, email marketing, and so forth. We get lots of leads from it. So leads are simply just a byproduct of traffic. The reason this was so high is because we did a webinar with another organization and we captured a lot of leads that particular month. All right, so this brings me to kind of part two of our discussion. And we're going to have Q and A at the end. So I'm hoping to spend actually the bulk of time answering your questions. But I want to show you one of the things with content marketing or inbound marketing is it's not a quick fix. It takes a bit of time to get your results. And not all of us have the luxury of waiting for results. So what are you supposed to do in the meantime? So I'm publishing my two blog posts per week, and I've got my sales funnel built, but I'm not getting enough leads yet. So what should I do? What you should do is something called target account selling. This was something that I first learned about in a book by Chet Holmes. Called the ultimate sales machine. And unlike how I started in business, which was this, when I first got my first sales job, my sales manager, I was a stockbroker and I was 23, 23 years old, sales manager comes in, gives me the phone, gives me the phone book and says, smile and dial. See you later. And he walked away. That is not a finite list. That is an infinite list. And the problem with that is if you have an infinite list of prospects, you'll only ever touch each prospect one time. And that's never going to work for you. Target account selling is predicated on the fact that you have a very specific list that you've created of ideal prospects that meet a certain criteria. And on this list, I would say you're probably prospecting no more than a couple hundred people at a time. If you have a obviously varies depending upon your business. If you have a very, very high priced product, it might only be 30 people on your target list. You might have 500 people on your target list. If it's a relatively low priced product, it really just depends on your business. My point here is you need to have a finite list so that you can touch them over and over again. So there's a couple of challenges that I'm going to help you solve. One is how do you find a list? Two is how do you get their contact information? And of course, how do you get their attention? Remember I said it was really hard to get people's attention these days? What do you say to them to get their attention? And of course, how do you make it scalable? And what I should have added to that bullet point was how do you make it scalable and automate it? So I'm going to give you answers to all of those things here in the next couple of minutes. So there's a couple of different ways to build lists that have worked very well for us. LinkedIn is a fantastic tool. If you get the premium account, which is the $50 a month account, you can very easily do searches on LinkedIn and punch in all sorts of criteria. You can say, I want companies, I want A list of CMOs and CEOs of companies that are in this industry that have this amount of revenue, that are in this geographic region and whatever other criteria LinkedIn gives you. So it's a really wonderful search tool to build that list and that's going to give you a list of websites and it's going to give you a list of people. I'm going to show you in a minute how you can get Their contact information very, very easily. Another thing that we do is if our target list has an exhibit coming up or a conference, and they do, we look for the list of exhibitors. Now, the particular niche that we're targeting, they have a couple. It's a really big conference. About 150,000 people go there, and there's a large list of exhibitors. And those companies are our ideal prospects. So we put them on our list. Lastly, I don't really recommend this, but you can just go and buy a list. The problem is it's probably not going to be that accurate. When I've bought lists from companies in the past like infousa or Hoover's or whoever. Generally speaking, maybe it's better now because I haven't bought one in a few years. But most of. Not most, at least a third of the list, the information is junk. So you end up paying a pretty penny for that information. And the way I'm going to show you how to do it, it's actually quite cost effective to build it yourself. And when I say yourself, I don't necessarily mean you. In our case, we have a virtual assistant, someone who works in the Philippines, and we pay them, you know, like three or four bucks an hour, which is the going wage in the Philippines. They're the ones doing actual all the legwork for us in the way that I'm about to explain to you. Okay, so how do you get their contact details? Well, again, I want to go back to my web browser and I want to show you. So let's say that we were targeting Microsoft. So we'll go to Microsoft's website. There are two ways to do this. I'm showing you the first way. There is a tool out there called HubSpot Signals, and I think it's like 50 bucks a month for this particular tool. If you look where my mouse is in the very top right hand portion of my browser, you see this little faded button here? Watch what happens when I click that. I get instantly the company's revenue, so I know how big they are. So this is great when you're researching companies. So this is what I would have my virtual assistant do. Come here and I would say to her, I only want companies with revenue between a certain range and a certain range. And so she'll very easily be able to see that I only want companies that have a certain number of employees or in a certain location. So all of that information is going to be displayed right there. But here's the really cool thing. Look at all these people. I Want Trevor Chow's email? I just click the email button and it does a little bit of whatever their programming does in the background. There we go. It's trevinicrosoft.com and you can search for people. So as you can see, this makes getting an email address really, really, really easy to do. That is one of two tools. The second one is this tool called Capture, and this is actually an even more powerful tool. And if you go to broadlook.com capture this URL right here, hopefully you guys can see that and watch this video. It does what the HubSpot tool does, but it does a whole bunch more stuff as well, which is pretty darn awesome. And you can import this stuff into a variety of different CRMs, or you can get a spreadsheet or whatever. So between one of those two tools, you have completely solved the problem of how do I get their contact information? All right, so now how do you get their attention? Well, according to a study by Leeds360, and this is a call center company that has since been acquired, so their name isn't Leeds360 anymore. But they did this study and they basically said no. Great surprise. Obviously, if you make at least six attempts to get a hold of somebody, you'll have a 93% chance. So rule number one is be persistent, and rule number two is follow a schedule. Now, one of the things that I encourage that you do, this is where content, which we talked about in the first part of the webinar and this prospecting tie together when you're going through this schedule. And I don't make phone calls, by the way. I do this all automated with emails. And I'll show you how I'm going to do that. I'm going to show you the tool that I use. But. And I don't necessarily email them this often. My point is I will email people six times. I don't email people three times in a day. That would be crazy. You need to make sure that what you're saying to them is not, not, oops, not about your product and services. Instead, you want to ask questions, you want to be helpful, you want to share your content, you want to share other people's content. In essence, what you want to do is add value. So let me give you an example. I created a LinkedIn group for people who are on my target list. So when I created the LinkedIn group, there was nobody in it. But I want all of these people to have the opportunity to join this LinkedIn group so they can engage in Discussion with their peers. Well, isn't that a great thing to send them in an email to say, hey, are you a member of this group? Is this something that you were aware of? Did you know there's a group especially created for the people that are in your industry? Would you like to be a part of it? I have. I'm starting to build this group. I get replies to my emails about 10% of the time. And I'll show you how I send those emails here because it's all automated and I've already had one of the people who's joined the group go to my website, look at it, email me and say, hey, we actually kind of need what you do. Can we talk to you about maybe working together? So notice I didn't get a hold of the guy with an email that says some version of hey, do you want to buy my stuff? I thought, I'm going to put his interests first and add value and be helpful. And so when you're creating your sequences of cold email prospecting, that is the key to success. Another thing that works very, very well if you have a podcast, and if you don't, I would encourage that you get one. Because interviewing other people is also a fantastic way to get your foot in the door when you send an email to. In my case, I target chief marketing officers. When I send an email to them that says, I'd like to talk to you about being a guest on my show, the response rate for that email is substantially higher than I'd like to talk to you about buying my product or, or buying my service, as you might imagine, because I'm coming in as a reporter as opposed to a salesperson. And I have landed several clients this way. What happens is I do a pre interview with them. So that's a short call, 10, 15 minutes to figure out if they'd be a good guest during that period of time. I'm also kind of asking questions to qualify them on whether they'd be a good client or not. So I sort of bury those questions into my script that I'm going through. And if it turns out that they're going to be a really great guest but a lousy client, I'll still record an interview with them because that's great content that I can use later on. But if they're like a so so interview, but they're a really great prospect, guess what? I'll still interview them. Because what happens is at the end of that hour long conversation when we record the interview, of course, rapport is the byproduct of talking to someone for that long. On several occasions, I have had people say to me, after we've done recording, hey, you know all this inbound marketing stuff that we just talked about? Well, actually, we're not really doing as well at that as we'd like to. Is that something you can help us with? And I've landed a couple of clients that way as well. So how do you make it all go. And this is the last. I believe this is the last slide. Yeah, this last slide. There is a couple of ways to do this now. You could use an autoresponder. You could use AWeber Mailchimp or Infusionsoft or HubSpot or whatever the heck you like. The problem with that is that with an autoresponder, at the bottom of every email there's an unsubscribe link that lets people. When people see that, they know it's obvious to them that it's an automated series of emails. So they're not going to be as inclined to reply. It doesn't look personal. So there's a fellow named Jeremy who's from over in Europe, and he's created this app called quickmail IO and I'm just going to log into it and show you how it works. The great thing about quickmail is that actually, you know what, my prospects are in there. So I don't really want to show that. I'm just going to talk about it instead. If you want to get a free trial, you can go and get a free trial. The great thing about quickmail is it actually sends the emails from my Gmail account. And the way it works is, is that I can set up a series. It's called a sequence. So a sequence might be one email, it might be five emails. In my case, most of my prospecting sequences are six emails long. So I go and I create the sequence. Maybe I can go into my sequences and show you. That way you're not going to see any. There we go. You're not going to see any of my prospects. So here we go. Salesforce Partners. Because that's one of the niches that I target. So this is the sequence. Hi, first name. My name is Trent and I'm reaching out to invite you to become a part of the community of Salesforce executives. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a little video I give them, there's my contact information. That email will go out to everyone that I attach to the sequence and then if they don't reply, in my case, Two days later another one will go out that basically says, hey, I see you haven't joined the group yet. Just want to make sure the email below didn't fall through the cracks. And below this line will be this email. And if they reply to that one, they're never going to see any of the other emails. If they don't reply, they're going to see the next one and the next one and the next one. So the great thing about this, of course, is, like I say, it is a complete set and forget system. And when you take this approach, and I've been getting about a 10% response rate, which is much, much, much better than anything else that I have tried from a cold outreach perspective. So the goal here, again, just to summarize, you want to make sure that you set up a sequence and you can do this manually if you don't want to use this tool. But you need to reach out to people at least six times, number one. And number two, you need to be feeding them content that is helpful for them. For example, so this one's talking about the LinkedIn group, this one's reminding them about the LinkedIn group. Then this one's saying, hey, you know, there's more stuff about the LinkedIn group. Plus I send them to a landing page that has a video, a whiteboard video of me where I'm explaining to them some very common mistakes that I see on people's blog, how they should solve those problems. And they can just watch that video and they'll get value, of course. But if they want to get more information, there's a way for me to capture a lead right there. So when you take this approach, folks, it works very, very well. And that's pretty much it for my scheduled talk. I want to open it up for questions now. If we.
35:23
Mark
Okay.
35:24
Trent Dyrsmid
Hey, are you there?
35:25
Mark
Yeah, no, it's been on the Oktopost side here. So if you can just give me back presentership so that we can move forward. Okay, so now we've opened it up for questions. So the first question question is when you spoke before about sending the emails and basically automated emails and getting in touch with prospects. So then where would you draw the line between being persistent and, I guess, being annoying? It was the sixth.
36:09
Trent Dyrsmid
There are six emails. So the first two emails are separated by two days. All the other emails are separated by a week. So I will basically be emailing an individual prospect more or less once a week for six weeks. I don't think that that's too. And again, remember, I'M sending them content that, even if they never do business with me, is helpful to them. So I don't think I don't get any complaints or I get almost. No, I mean, you're going to get a complaint from somewhere. And I think I've had out of 250 or so of those emails that have gone out or to 250 people, I think I've had one person complain.
36:53
Mark
Okay, great answer. So the next question is, aside from SEO, how do you drive traffic to the content that we spoke about?
37:04
Trent Dyrsmid
Social media plays a really big role in that. So. So we are actually big users of Oktopost. I absolutely love Oktopost software and I use it specifically to promote our content into a number of LinkedIn groups. We also. So because I'm B2B, really the only two social networks that I have any interest in focusing on are Twitter and LinkedIn. And so within our HubSpot tool, it makes it really, really. Because I use HubSpot for my content creation promotion, it makes it very easy for us to promote it on a whole bunch of different social media platforms. But we use HubSpot's tool to promote on Twitter and we send a lot of tweets every day. And then like I say, I use Oktopost's tool to pre schedule all of this content that I'm sharing in LinkedIn groups. And so social media, as you saw on one of my earlier slides, isn't my number one source of traffic. The SEO is. But social media does also make a very meaningful impact. The other way that I'm promoting my content is in the email prospecting that I explained to you in the second part of this. With that target list, I'm saying to people, okay, here's a piece of content. I think you would be interested in it next week. Here's another piece of content I think you'd be interested in it. And then of course, we have a mailing list because, because we produce content on an ongoing basis. 2.5 to 3% of the people who visit our site join our list. And so now our list is, I think it's 11 or 12,000 people deep. And so all of those people are also getting a weekly email with a summary of all of the content that we published that week. And maybe some of the, not maybe I know a good portion of those people are going and reading those pieces of content and they're also tweeting it out or they're sharing it on LinkedIn. So there is an extra layer of promotion that happens and then of course, some of the people that read that shared and some of the people that read that. So it kind of just continues on. One other way, sorry, I should be remiss is we also syndicate our content, so syndication. We use a site called Business to Community. We use Quora, we use Medium. We syndicate content on HubSpot on a couple of HubSpot sites, different blogs. Basically, we build relationships with people who own other platforms. And if you do that correctly, then you'll be able to either write original content for them or in many cases simply syndicate your existing content, which is what I prefer. And that will also get you a lot more eyeballs onto your content as well. The key though, the key is making sure that the content was written for a specific target audience, so it's really, really relevant. If you're trying to make your content appeal to absolutely everybody, it'll end up appealing to nobody and you won't get any traction with it. So all the promotion in the world won't have a very positive impact if you haven't written or created the content correctly in the first place.
40:15
Mark
Great, thanks for that answer. So the next question is about paid advertising. So I think the question is within content marketing. As a B2B company looking at content marketing, how much of your marketing dollars in the marketing pie should go to content marketing as opposed to paid ads and things like that?
40:36
Trent Dyrsmid
In our case, we're not currently using any paid ads. And it's not because paid ads are all bad. Paid ads can actually work very, very well if you do them right. So something that I noticed a number of people do is something called retargeting. So retargeting is a way of essentially, if someone visits your website, they get cookied and then using retargeting, you can kind of follow them around the Internet. So for example, let's say you went to Amazon and you were looking at a new blender, but you didn't buy the thing. You've probably noticed that as you go around to other websites, you're seeing the ad for the blender that you looked at. Kind of stalking you, for lack of a better word, to keep showing up in other places. That is what retargeting is. And I think retargeting actually is a worthwhile and effective form of media buying. I simply just haven't devoted the time or energy to setting up a campaign because we are growing pretty much at about as fast as we want to grow right now. Like as a service business, I can only take on so many clients In a month. And we're kind of at that limit. As far as using other forms of pay per click, like Google pay per click, I think it really heavily depends upon the business that you're in. If I was to do it, I'm only going to do it to promote a really epic piece of content that I have created. So maybe you've got, maybe you've created an ebook, and maybe you've already proven that the landing page that offers that ebook has a 50 or 60% conversion rate for traffic that comes from your blog posts. So you know that, hey, that ebook's really resonating with your target audience. You would then look at, okay, of all of the blog posts that promoted that particular call to action, that particular landing page, which blog post got the most engagement? So you would look at your number of social media shares and a tool that you can use to do that, and you can just look and count them, or you can use quicksprout.com and it'll do the analysis across your entire site. So now you've got one blog post, which was by far the most popular, and you've got this landing page. What I might do at that point is set up a paid campaign to send traffic to either the blog post or directly to the landing page. And I have to pay close attention to the metrics to see whether or not it was working. Now, your question was, how much should you devote to paid versus content creation? In my case, I devote the bulk of my budget to content creation because, as you'll recall, in the early part of my webinar, I said, when you're spending money on advertising, it's temporary. You're only renting attention. So the problem is, if you spend, say, $3,000 a month on advertising, after a year, you have no residual asset other than maybe you've built a mailing list. But if you spend $3,000 a month on content creation for a year, you have a lot of content that even after you say you don't spend any money in year two, all that content still live, all those blog posts, they're still indexed, they're still getting traffic, they're still getting shared. On social, if there's videos, they're still getting watched. Like my video that I created three years ago, which landed me a client there last week. That stuff has a very long shelf life. So I really think that you should spend the bulk of your money. Creating content is genuinely helpful and answers the questions to your target market at the top of the funnel. I think that's a better way to go.
44:10
Mark
Okay, so we have time for one last question. So the question is, do you measure ROI for specific content pieces? So I think you mentioned like the YouTube video have and ebooks, things like that. So then do you measure the ROI for each content specifically? And if so, what has the best ROI, like blogs, YouTube, ebook, things like that?
44:31
Trent Dyrsmid
We measure everything. That's one of the reasons we use the HubSpot software is it's really, really helpful in terms of analytics. We know what the conversion rates are on our calls to action. We know what the conversion rates are on our landing pages. We know how our marketing funnels are performing. We also build customized Google Analytics dashboards to give us supplementary data. And we also generate something called a lead scoring report that shows us the quality of the leads that we're capturing. And so that helps us to determine which sources produce the highest quality leads for a given campaign. So yes, we absolutely measure the heck out of everything.
45:20
Mark
Thank you. So, unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. However, if you have any further questions that were that we weren't able to cover in today's session, you are welcome to send your questions to either Mark, our marketing director, and his email is on the screen as well as Trent, whose email is on the screen as well. I'll leave this slide up for another few minutes just so you can copy down the details. Thanks again, Trent, for a great webinar. It was really insightful and we really appreciate that and thank you guys for attending the webinar and I hope that you found it valuable and that you have a great day.
45:52
Trent Dyrsmid
Thanks very much everybody.
45:55
Mark
Thanks, Trent. Bye Bye.
