00:00
I’m so excited about today’s webinar. Normally, I invite a speaker; today, it’s just me. For those of you who have been here before, these are designed to be pretty interactive. I’m going to ask you to put things in the chat. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions along the way. But today, we are talking about something a little different than just marketing. We’re talking about taking it a level up.
So, how to become the best-known managed services provider in your market or your niche. I’m going to be covering all of them — some really specific things. But I want to make sure that we all understand that the assumption before we get into all of this is that you have, in some capacity, tackled or checked off that foundational marketing component. You have your logo. You have kind of a consistent look and feel for your brand. You have your messaging and your website. You have a Google Business Profile set up. You have your sales CRM — some of those more foundational things.
If you don’t have those, no problem. I just want to make sure that, as we start talking about what it takes to become the best-known managed services provider — IT business, or I know we have some on the call who are in telecom or internet service providers. So this really all can apply. If you are B2B in the telecom, IT, MSP, or the tech world, all of these things can apply. But we want to assume that some of those foundational things are done.
The next thing we’re going to check off is really doing what it takes to get noticed everywhere by your ideal buyer and transform your marketing into a true engine that generates leads for people who are ready to buy. If you’re here today searching for the quick fix or the one marketing thing that you can do to skyrocket your growth, then you can go ahead and check out right now.
Because we are not talking about one thing. There’s not a magic pill. There’s not a magic sauce. We’re going to really dig into omnipresence. I didn’t want to put that in the title of this webinar because that could lose people. But we’re going to be talking about truly developing a multi-channel or omnipresent marketing approach.
For those of you who may not know who I am, I’m Laura Johns, founder and CEO of The Business Growers. I’ve had 19 years in telecommunications and tech marketing. You can see here, I was working as a chief marketing officer for a managed services provider before I started The Business Growers. Now, I have an amazing team of 16 women who are kicking tail every day for our clients, making sure that they get the best in marketing for managed services providers and IT businesses.
So that’s who I am. I live here in Jackson, Mississippi. We have clients across 23 states. We’re really excited to talk more about how we can help your managed services provider or IT business today, becoming the best-known MSP in your market.
03:04
First, I’m going to ask you for a vote. Like I said, we are not the kind of people who just sit here and talk. We want to get some interaction. And I know Steve will help me out here; he always does. So put a one in the chat if you would rather be the best-known managed services provider or IT business or whatever your business category is, or a two in the chat if you would rather be the best, regardless of who knows you exist. I’m excited to see what some of these people say. Come on, y’all. Two—somebody would rather be the best. One—good to know.
Okay. So best-known versus best. Well, unfortunately, being the best, if nobody knows about you, is a bit of a challenge, right? But best quality is great. John shared that he would rather be the best. So I love that. Best-known versus best.
Let’s talk about understanding your buyer first. You’re selling to businesses. 85% of buyers, what we’re finding, have done significant research before ever visiting a seller or approaching a seller. Gartner says 75% — you’ve probably heard me say this before if you’ve been on one of these webinars — of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free purchase experience or would like to do their research before they ever speak to someone when they’re ready to buy.
74% of B2B buyers (that’s from Forrester) complete more than half of their research online before an offline purchase. So tell me this, how many of you on the call (just put a thumbs up in the chat if you can find them) do a lot of your research online? Are you Googling, are you digging before you make a purchase decision, whether it’s a shirt, a belt, or a pair of shoes? Are you doing research before you purchase them? Yeah, I am.
Tell me this: In what scenarios is someone typically ready to buy managed IT or telecom services? Is it a disaster — something bad’s happened when they’re ready to buy? When they’re ready to buy, usually whenever a sales rep is to call somebody, they’re maybe not positioned to buy, right? They are doing their research. Studies show people are doing their research online.
I’m going to show a graphic that you’ve seen before. I showed this in my last webinar. This is just one example of the life cycle or sales process of a managed services provider and IT business. We talked about it a lot in the last webinar — how to take people who don’t know you at all, totally unaware, to someone who is engaged and ready to buy. For those of you who sell on this call, for those of you who are owners of the business or sell, what are some of the most difficult things? And put it in the chat if you can. If you want to unmute and say it out loud, I’d love to hear it. This is interactive. What are some of the most difficult things about overcoming sales objections?
Steve commented earlier about something bad happening when they’re ready to buy. They’ve had a bad experience. So, overcoming sales objections. Yeah, discovering objections.
06:48
A lot of us, when we get on the phone to sell or have a conversation face-to-face, it feels like you’re having to explain yourself or prove your worth. They don’t know about you, they’ve never heard of you, so you’re working to justify their investment. For a lot of my telecom companies, you might be trying to sell when there’s not a discernible difference. Let’s say you’re providing VoIP, and other people provide the same product. You want to talk about your relationships with your customers, how committed you are to your clients, and the service that you offer. But that’s a really hard thing to sell when they don’t experience it on the front end. They can’t experience it, so it’s a very hard gap to fill, right? You’re having to combat these objections.
If you look here in this graphic, you’ll see that when you’re trying to get someone to buy from you, you’re going from unaware to aware. Typically, they get 70% of the way there before they even have a conversation. So, they pretty much made their decision. How many prospecting calls have you been on — anybody, raise your hand, thumbs up — when your value was being questioned? “Well, I don’t know if I really need all that. I don’t know that I need that bundle. I think I can…” Thumbs up if your value has been questioned. You’re having to prove yourself.
In sales, we’re doing a lot of qualifying, convincing, discussing — all on the front end. What if there was a way to develop authority before the person even talks to you? What if there was a way to get them pre-positioned to buy? What if there was a way to make you the only relevant option for your buyer? And that statistic we talked about, I think Steve put it in there, they only want to buy from you when something bad’s happened. They’re disillusioned with their current provider or they’ve got a break-fix guy that’s helping them. Statistically, 3% of the people that can buy from you are actually in buying mode.
9:06
Today, when you hear “best-known MSP” or “best-known IT provider,” we’re going to be talking about how to get those people that you are talking to on a regular basis when you actually have a prospecting call. We’re going to talk about how to get them to the point where they’re ready to buy from you.
I want somebody in sales to tell me how good it feels. Let’s talk about the flip of this: How good does it feel when someone already knows who you are? You get a really, really hot referral. How good does that feel? You just have to show up and tell them what you do and then seal the deal, right?
Well, every conversation, if you follow some of these things that we’re going to talk about today, can move your business from having to be relatively unknown, convincing someone of who you are, to moving them to you nine out of ten times getting someone on the phone with you who is already familiar with you. To me, it’s really a game-changer. It would dramatically change your business if they knew a lot about your story, and they had already seen your case studies. It’s a different conversation, right?
What we’re going to do is talk about a way to put your arm around them and show them the reason that you’re the only option and get them to the point where they’re ready to buy. How do we do that? Anybody want to talk about it? That was my really, really, really long prequel to our conversation.
I think there are excellent ways to deliver your services, mechanisms, policies, procedures, and talent that all come together and deliver the right solutions, service, communication, and forward-looking details. And the ability to communicate that comes with a lot of experience, right? So you have this experience where you’ve seen all this. When you’re face-to-face and you’re meeting those objections, you can speak with a level of confidence and provide examples of why those objections can be set aside with us.
So, I think the best way I could package that up is to say the ability to deliver a compelling message shows that we can do the job and that those objections shouldn’t be tagged to us.
Right, right. I love that. Thank you, Steve. Steve’s one of my favorite participants in these webinars. All the things we’re going to talk about from this point forward, we’re discussing getting them ready to buy when they get on the phone with you. We’re trying to get them to the point where those objections are already done. Like I said, when you get a burning hot referral, it’s because you’ve built that trust. Somebody that’s referred them to you trusts you.
12:09
What we’re doing now is talking about how to build that trust in a digital way, and we talked about it last webinar with ads. Now, we’re going to be talking about omnipresence. You’ll hear me talk about being everywhere your buyer is. It seems impossible especially if you’re kind of a generalist MSP or IT company, but I’ll explain to you how. I call it the trust building marketing approach. When you hear omnipresence, you also hear multichannel. It can be called any of those things, but to do this, we’ve got to have an omnipresent mindset.
For those of you in sales, this is the hardest rule: You have to forget about sales as the main objective. If you truly have an omnipresent mindset, you need to be thinking about what’s best for the customer, giving them as much information as you can, and being in it for the long run.
Being omnipresent — being everywhere they are in your niche or in your market — helps you grow faster. It gives you authority. What does authority do for your business? It gets you faster to cash — less overcoming of obstacles. If you all know from the movie Tommy Boy, he was a really bad salesman. But we need to eliminate the stress when it comes to selling by creating an omnipresent approach, building that authority, and getting you faster to cash, faster to close.
What we’ve discovered is that 6 to 18 months is our typical sales cycle. But instead of focusing on sales, we’re going to shift our mindset. If it’s just for this call, it’s just for this call. But shifting your mindset from “I’ve got to convince them to buy from me” to “I’ve got to become the authority in my niche or my market.”
So how do we do that? Find your audience. We’re going to talk about this for a second. This is a little different from most marketing exercises you might have done before. Give me a one in the chat if you’ve done a persona or messaging around your target customer type of exercise. Has anybody done that type of exercise?
We probably have all experienced trying to identify how to message or how to say the right things in front of our audience. This is a little bit different from that. When we say find your audience, we’re not talking about persona of your buyer. We’re not talking about their buying behavior or anything like that. We’re talking about actually building your list.
I love Coldlytics. You’ll see the link. You’re welcome to use my referral link to Coldlytics. It is, in my opinion, a better option and a more affordable option than ZoomInfo.
15:15
ZoomInfo, you pay a lot of money, and you’re in a contract for at least a year. Coldlytics — you buy what you need, and then you can be done. I’m a big fan.
If you have not identified who your target customer is, what your target service area is, then unfortunately, for your marketing and sales team, you’re all over the map. You’re having to identify prospects all over the map. If you start to think with an omnipresent approach and you really start to think about building trust with your ideal prospect, then I want to challenge you to think deep and not wide. I support niching down. If you want to choose health care or legal, if you don’t, for whatever reason, that’s fine too. But I’m a big fan of selecting a niche to help you accomplish this or at least focusing on a specific market and getting ready to saturate it. Totally saturate it.
One would be purchasing a list of your ideal contacts, about 1,000 to 2,500. Two would be sitting one afternoon with your team and writing down your dream 100. We can go buy a list or purchase a list. But also, let’s brainstorm and say, okay, this year, who are the top 100 people that we want to be everywhere in front of? We want to show up everywhere they are.
Because when you start to think about, instead of going from a huge, wide, wide, wide area, a national approach, having to figure out how to get in front of all these people all over the country, let’s think about a market we want to saturate. Or, let’s think about a niche that we want to focus on.
You can easily get your list. You can easily spend an afternoon writing down your dream 100. Let’s put those people in the pipeline instead of waiting on someone to bite to put them in the pipeline. Let’s go put those people in the pipeline, and everything we do focuses on these folks.
Also, industry associations. If you are an MSP or IT business focused on one particular industry, one particular type of customer, you certainly want to show up everywhere they are. I believe that if you’re investing, these people know you’re serious about their type of business. If you show up and you have case studies of other clients just like them that you’ve served.
Remember, we’re kind of bridging that gap from you having to explain yourself or defend yourself on a sales call. We’re really getting familiar with these people and going deep and not wide. What other people sell to them that we could partner with? What consultants are in this industry that are also selling to this exact same customer type, software providers, that type of thing? You think about those partnerships and being in front of them too.
And then lastly, who are their key employees? Who are their key stakeholders? Who’s on their board? Remember, they’re human. So they’re probably on a social media platform or they probably attend events, they’re probably reading certain publications or online.
Are y’all kind of seeing what I’m saying? We’re honing in on an audience and not just, “Hey, our buyer is a man in his sixties.” I’m talking, it is an attorney who lives in this area and that’s who we’re going after.
18:43
When you hone in on your exact buyer — this is just a sample, it’s not a real sales CRM snapshot — your sales CRM and your sales team becomes a lot cleaner, a lot more focused.
Any questions or thoughts as we go into the next step? Okay.
So who are these people? This is kind of the question that we’re answering, but like, where are they? What conferences do they attend? What publications are they reading? What networking events do they attend and sponsor? What community events do they attend?
Just ask yourself these questions as you’re building out that list.
Now we’re going to create content for them. This is the part that sometimes gets overwhelming, but remember, if we have honed in and gone deep and not wide with who we are selling to, now we can get more precise on the type of content we want to create. So create content they will engage with. We’re not talking about just what you sell.
Our team had this conversation on Monday. What might they be seeking? Let’s kind of think about what resources do they need? Maybe I would say the number one problem that most business owners are having right now, maybe employee related?
Any other thoughts about what business problems? Productivity with their employees, hiring and firing, developing? Maybe the content that they need is a hiring or firing guide or an org chart template or a process or SOP template to help them build?
21:06
We don’t have to always come to our ideal buyer with a guide to better IT for their business, right? You know, that’s the problem that you can solve, which is great to provide those as resources as well, but we really want to create content for them that is really going to help them in their business.
You know, one of the things that my team’s talked about is providing social media templates, some graphics for our ideal client, and just letting them have a whole bunch of graphics to go use on their own. So you also need to think about the common problems they face. What’s the number one pain point in their business?
Going back to the employees, hiring, firing, some of that kind of stuff. Understanding their basic business concepts is also a great start. If you’re a CEO or a founder, you’ve probably read some books. Maybe you can just speak about business leadership in your content. If you’re a business owner and you’re trying to sell to a business owner, maybe you just read a business book and paraphrase that content in a blog post or get on a video and talk about that.
At The Business Growers, we’re using EOS. I’m a big fan of the book Traction. I think I actually just recorded a podcast a couple of weeks ago with someone who is an EOS implementer, but any business owner can benefit from that, not just managed services providers, who are my niche — my ideal client.
I love this simple content strategy idea for IT companies and business owners of managed services providers:
1. First read this book or listen to this book They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Big fan.
2. Have your team read the book. Spend a couple of hours and do an internal content workshop.
What does that mean, Laura? Well, if you read the book, you’ll listen to the author of that book. Marcus talks you through his experience as a pool and spa owner through the 2008 recession and how he managed and navigated that. He did it with content. He did it with creating information and putting it on his website. And what he did was, instead of just saying “Here’s how we can solve your IT problems,” he developed content around why you shouldn’t buy a fiberglass pool. Because guess what? If somebody is searching that, guess what website they’re going to come to? Yours. And then your next blog post is going to be: But here’s why you should. Right?
Anything that your prospects are asking you that your current customers ask you, sit down with your team for two hours, develop 100 questions that you get asked all the time that you’re thinking, “If I could just have this resource somewhere it would make my life a lot easier,” and start creating the content.
24:20
Delegate it to your team. If you don’t want to write it all, you can outsource the writing to a freelancer, but get that content written. Get it on your website. Because guess what? You can turn that into a blog. You can turn it into a video. You can turn it into a webinar. You could turn it into a free download — something for free.
I had a client talk to me this morning who had such popular pieces of content on his website. One particular blog post had performed three times better than any other, so guess what we did? We put a gate on it. We’re going to put a gate on it and have somebody fill out their email address to get to it, so we can get their email address.
Great opportunity for you just to sit down with your team, and figure out what those questions are. So another option is to pay someone to interview you for an hour, or get one of your team members to interview you for an hour if they have a writing skill, and talk about the number one pain point that you address for your clients in a serving mentality. And then take that and turn it into what we call a pillar piece at The Business Growers. We like to take a really big piece of content and turn it into lots of little pieces of content.
Also, how many of you remember what you posted about on social media 30 days ago? Anybody? How many people remember what they wore 30 days ago? Anybody?
The chances of people looking at your social media also, with the algorithm, we’re not even sure how many actually see it, I think it’s like less than 1%.
Let’s just say you do an interview with someone. They record it. You can go transcript it. Lots of AI tools I’m going to show you in just a second do that. Clip it up, and repurpose it. Large content can become small content and you can quite literally use what I like to call that pillar piece. If you do a good, good interview about your value prop and chop it up into little pieces, you can use one piece of content for a quarter or six months, quite literally. And, of course, we like to add other pieces of content to it, but that’s just an exercise that you can do to create some content.
Props to my team for what they’ve done — Grace on the call and other team members who contributed to the blog, you can kind of see here. But we quite literally just take all the problems that we know our clients have and create content around it. And this is great for search. This is great for authority building. But everything I do and that I communicate is to that one target list or one target type of customer.
27:17
I’m not trying to solve everybody’s problems, right? We’re just trying to give information to our target audience that solves their problem. You see some nice shots on here, but you can see kind of how we take a lot of different pieces of content.
Here’s some tools that we like to use — some of our favorite tools. If there are others that I miss, my team can put them in here. I love Descript for transcribing. So when you take a long-form video or audio piece, it can transcript that. Also, Opus Clip clips things up into video clips into little small pieces and you can repurpose those. I love captions on my cell phone. Look into that. If you are willing to jump on your cell phone and talk, I think it’s a great tool. If you follow me on LinkedIn — if you don’t, feel free to — you can see how I’m using captions to add captions to my videos and posting on my personal LinkedIn.
So these are tools that make things easier. I love Claude. Of course ChatGPT works as well, but there are lots of tools out there to take one big piece. The good thing is once you write one big piece, you can put it in an AI tool and ask it to give you lots of little pieces of content. And it will do that quite easily. We are living today in a world that makes it really easier than it ever has been before, to be quite honest.
Back to this graphic. We know conceptually what that trust-building marketing (i.e. omnipresence) means and how we’re going to create our content. Now, let’s talk about the distribution of the content. Some of you have seen this graphic from me before. I just like to show this because this is really particularly about sales outreach. But I also, again, just want to reiterate the fact that it does take an average of 13 to 17 touches in business to business to convert a lead to a new customer.
You can see there are a lot of ways that we can touch and reach our particular market customer in our particular market or our particular industry that we’re focused on. Some of them cost more than others, of course, but there are lots of opportunities to do it.
I actually had a client — one of Anna’s clients, Anna is on my call — send me a text message a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that they had been playing travel ball with someone for 10 years. Their kids played together for a decade and she never realized that he was in IT and managed services provider. Never realized it until she saw a Facebook ad.
30:22
Once she saw the Facebook ad, she went to his website and saw logos and testimonials of other companies similar to hers that had used this particular IT company — managed services provider. Having known him for 10 years, a Facebook ad paired with a website with a good testimonial, and that’s what got him $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And that’s one month, so times 36, right?
It’s just a good reminder that there’s not a magic pill. There’s not one magic sauce that you can sprinkle on everything or pixie dust. It is truly about building trust in every one of these areas. And, again, I won’t go through them all. We’re about to go through some more in just a second, but one of them is exactly what I’m doing right now. It’s a webinar.
I understand this is probably the most resistance I get when I make this recommendation to clients because it does take time. It takes time to plan. It takes time to produce. Not as much as you think it would, but it does take time.
Going back to that exercise where we wrote down the 100 problems that we discussed that our clients have that we can solve. So put all those in a list of the top 12. And if you have a marketing team, ask them which ones rank highest on Google, because we can go look at keywords for you. And then do a monthly webinar where you promote to your list that we’ve already picked.
Of course, we have some people, a handful of people that register, but guess what? We have a replay that we send them. This lives forever on YouTube. And then we can chop this up and deliver it on social media dozens of times.
So while it may seem exhausting, nobody shows up, this is a waste of my time. You can get this and you can also run ads on it. So if you have a really good topic on a webinar, you can take that, put it on YouTube, send the replay, run ads on it, and promote it forever. It is truly evergreen. You can transcribe it and write a blog post on it. This just goes to show that the investment of a couple of hours a month can turn into something very valuable.
33:01
Also, I’m going to pick on Steve for a second since I know he’ll talk to me. You don’t have to say anything, Steve. But also, when you have developed all of this content that is focused on their pain points, Steve, and you get on the phone with somebody, and they give you a couple of pain points they’re experiencing throughout the sales process, Steve can also send them resources. “Hey, I just published a blog post on this. Let me send it to you. I just addressed this pain point in a recent podcast or webinar. Let me send it to you.”
So, kind of positioning you as that authority. You are moving people through the buying cycle with your expertise and your support because you’ve created this content and these assets.
Podcasts are another thing you can do. And you don’t have to do all these things at once. Just start somewhere. This can be used just like a webinar can be used, but I like two podcasts a month at minimum. Sometimes I do these by myself. And when I say I do them by myself, I’m talking I get on Zoom and I hit record. And I pick one of these topics that I know is important to my client.
Another great, great, great idea is if you already created that dream 100 list, guess who you can ask to speak on your podcast? They don’t have to be your customers or clients. And I have never met a person that did not want to be on a podcast. Take your dream 100 list and pursue that dream 100 list, asking them to be on.
And what is that going to do? If you go ask a business owner who has expertise in something to be on your podcast and you’re delivering more value for your customer, again, it just continues to give you authority and really puts you in a place where you’re pre-positioned for the buyer. Again, Zoom is fine. Don’t overthink it. I post these on YouTube and then we have a syndication tool that we use for Apple and Spotify. We love to distribute these through email, distribute on social media, and have just more touch points for more pieces of content.
35:13
I personally like 20 minutes or less on a podcast. People usually listen to these while they drive or while they’re on a walk or whatever it is mobile. So I like to do quick, short, helpful podcasts. Any questions? No questions? Okay.
So, email marketing, let’s go ahead and roll our eyes. We hate it. Especially those of you with those firewalls that we love so much. Remember, we want to make sure that we are sending emails to people who want our emails, first of all.
But we want to give. We can use an opt-in on our website. We can use a free download. We can give resources to find out if they’re interested in subscribing and continuing to get resources. Make sure that there’s a value tied to everything you’re sending. Make sure that there’s something worth opting in. If they want to opt in, continue to send emails. If they don’t, they will let you know. They will unsubscribe, or you just don’t send them anything if they haven’t opted in.
But continuing to nurture your email list, I can’t express enough, is not one and done. We are not sending one email every three months and expecting it to close business. There is a book called Jab, Jab, Right Hook — basically making sure that you’re serving them all the time and then selling kind of on the side. We don’t want to sell, sell, sell. That’ll get you out of their inbox really quick. We want to make sure that there is value tied to everything you’re sending. You can send your webinars; you can send your podcast. I say always be nurturing: ABN. Make sure that you’re always sending something of value.
Are y’all seeing how this is building?
– We have a webinar.
– We have a podcast.
– We have emails that give them value that we can send to them.
Now, let’s talk about social media. If they’ve heard of you, they’ve seen you somewhere, you’ve done one of any of those things on the omnipresent graphic, and they see you and they start looking for you, you definitely want to be findable, right?
So make sure if they start digging that they’re able to find gold. This is really just an awareness — continuing to find the same information everywhere they go.
One quick tip: if you don’t have “Book an Appointment” embedded into your LinkedIn profile, that’s a new-ish feature. Make sure that you are, if you’re in sales, that you have that “Book an Appointment” enabled.
But also anytime someone comes to my feed, personally, I’ve talked in the last three to four days on camera in front of them about one of their problems. Also messaging them on LinkedIn, a direct message from time to time, sending them value, not just trying to sell them something. We also have a LinkedIn newsletter. For those of you not utilizing this, this is very simple to use and something you can send out very easily once a week.
38:26
What I love about the LinkedIn newsletter is that, I don’t know if you guys are familiar, but you get a weekly update or so from LinkedIn about what’s going on on LinkedIn. It sends you the newsletter; it not only posts to LinkedIn, but it goes in their inbox as well. So it’s basically like a newsletter from LinkedIn with your name all over it, which I love. But you can kind of see here if someone’s looking for The Business Growers or trying to figure out what we’re about and who we serve, they definitely know it’s us, right, and know what we do.
Okay, local ads. We did a whole webinar on this on digital ads, which I’m going to talk about in a second. We have not talked about or emphasized local advertising very much. One thing I do want to say I get asked all the time is, “Should we invest in the ball team sponsorship? Should we do the Chamber of Commerce networking event? Should we do all this?”
A really simple way to help you make the decision on whether or not it’s worth the investment: would you say 50% of the people there, if you’ve already gone back and established who your dream list and your ideal customer is, be that buyer, that particular person? And if the answer is no, I usually recommend don’t do it, go find somewhere that is.
If you want to dedicate a percentage of your budget to, “Hey, this is just me supporting the community, and I don’t care if it ever gets me a dollar,” then that’s fine, that’s your decision. But I always like to say, “Hey, if we’re going to make a local play, and we’re really going to make an investment into something in our local market, let’s find something where we know our buyer is going to be, right?”
If you’ve selected a legal niche, go sponsor a breakfast at the local bar association or whatever it is, you know. That’s the kind of stuff that we want to start thinking about.
I don’t address all of the things on that graphic where we showed, and I don’t know how many further I’ve got to go, so I’m probably going to have to go back. I don’t address everything on here, but let’s just look back at this so I can just touch on a couple of things really quickly:
– Search engine optimization: That’s where that content comes into play.
– Events and local sponsorships: We just talked about it. Just try to hit that 50% goal of making sure that you got the right people in the room.
– You always want a website that converts, and you always want to be giving them, first of all, buttons everywhere with the opportunity to meet with you, but also give them something for free so that you can capture that email address and start nurturing them. We don’t ever want to have an email address that we’re not nurturing.
41:25
We talked about the webinar.
SMS text: You know, if someone’s giving you their phone number, again, in exchange for something, or you have a phone number, I prefer a text message. It’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. We all know that everybody has a lot of different ways that they prefer to be communicated with, but again, if they’ve given you this information, then until they tell you to stop, you have the ability to use it for appointment reminders. I love appointment reminders via text, reminders about joining a webinar, joining a podcast, and things like that — making it relevant.
We talked about podcasts, educational resources, and always developing content that gives them something valuable for their company. Social media, we talked about.
Direct mail: Okay, a lot of people will say direct mail is dead. If we know for sure that we can, there are some ways to know for sure depending on the list that you get, but there are ways to get direct mail in the right hands. Depending on your budget, direct mail can be a good option. I always like to give them something that is more than a sheet of paper, so if you are going to do direct mail, do it with intent. Be very wise about what you’re giving them.
I’ve seen funny campaigns. In advance of an event, send a direct mail with one work glove and say how hard you work on their IT, and then when they see you at the conference, they can get the other glove. You want to be really smart with the way you do it, but direct mail can be very effective.
We talked about email.
We’re going to talk about paid ads and remarketing here in just a second. A lot of people ask me specifically about billboards, and just keep in mind, you know, you’ve got to decide if you want parts of your marketing to be a brand awareness play or a lead generation play. Both are good. You want people to know about your brand. It’s a great thing. But just know that not every brand awareness play, for example, like a billboard is going to be able to give you direct ROI. You may never know what that billboard influenced.
I took a class at the University of Alabama when I was in grad school. I had a professor tell me one time that you never want to do a billboard for something that can’t be consumed or called immediately. I actually got points off of a paper that I turned in because I had a hair product, Nexus hair product, on the billboard. I selected billboard as one of the media. My teacher said that unless you can immediately go consume it like a cheeseburger at McDonald’s or if it’s more than a mile off the interstate, then don’t do it. So you got to think about that. What’s the likelihood that somebody right then when they’re passing that is going to call you?
If you are okay doing it for a brand awareness play and not being able to tie that ROI to it directly, then it’s fine, but billboard is never truly a lead generation play. Again, direct mail, you can’t get decision making network. I really support networking groups. If you have a local networking group, especially if 50% of that networking group is in your audience, then I definitely support it. So any questions or thoughts? I’m about to get into paid ads, and then we’ll wrap up for questions.
44:48
There’s kind of two different trains of thought when it comes to paid ads. Obviously, you can choose different platforms. We have a variety of different platforms that we serve ads on for our clients depending on how well-known they are in their market. That’s a big play. If you’re introducing yourself for the first time, you want to make sure that you are giving them some brand awareness type ads first. I always say don’t ask somebody to marry you on the first date. So our team serves ads with guides, freebies, things like that to get in front of them, get their email address, continuing to nurture them, also moving down toward a different type ad we call middle of funnel, which is testimonials, videos, things like that, and then as we move toward conversion.
Thank goodness you can put pixels on web pages. You can retarget people who have visited a certain landing page, and you can get back in front of them with an incentive to book a meeting. We want to make sure, with ads, you are not just going just straight in cold. If you’re really trying to build authority, you want to make sure that you’re getting your full message out there and not just trying to marry them on the first date.
I’ve got a lot of thoughts on that, but I have a whole webinar on it that I did last month, so if you’re interested in that, Grace, I don’t know how handy it is, but maybe put the link into the ads webinar. That was maybe two webinars ago with me and Josh because that was a good one.
Okay, any questions? I’ll put my link up here if anybody wants to talk to me. If you would like to book some time with me, I offer to all my webinar attendees a growth session to talk about your business. Happy to do that.
Talking about being everywhere all the time can be overwhelming, but I encourage you to, again, kind of take your sales mindset and start looking at things through an omnipresent mindset.
47:07
You can see the ads webinar. She just stuck it in the chat, but start to think about how you can influence your target buyer, the right audience. Don’t think wide, think deep, and start chipping away at some of these things so that you can be in front of them all the time.
Once you start building rapport and building authority, it really will make a difference in the way that that buyer comes to you. They’ve already heard of you. They’ve already seen your ad. They saw you at a networking event. They also read four pieces of content before they called you, and you don’t have to spend time familiarizing yourself because you’ve already done the work. So it is a heavy load, but it’s no more heavy than trying to convince somebody that doesn’t even know you exist to buy from you. So I feel like it’s a much, much easier sales process when they are ready to buy.
Okay, we have about 10 minutes. Does anybody have any questions, any feedback, any thoughts? And I know we have, again, a variety of different types of folks on the call, so happy to address different industries if needed. Just feel free to speak up.
Steve: I think in our case, Laura, the ability to build on all the different pieces that we’re doing and then pick and choose, because we can’t do everything at once, right? But keeping this dialogue going and seeing all these things and how we might choose to create content in one of these areas, and then it becomes ammunition on your side, too, and our side. I think it’s great. Again, just another good webinar. Appreciate it.
Laura: Thank you. Another tool in your toolbox. I would say, if you’re totally overwhelmed, then maybe just start with that They Ask You Answer book today. Go ahead and buy that, and start letting that help you generate content ideas. That’d be a good next step for anyone on the call. Any other questions?
Doug: Hey, Laura, this is Doug. Could you walk back through and explain Coldlytics again? What is that?
Laura: I’ll actually log in. If anybody that wants to drop off, feel free to drop off, but I’m happy to just share my screen and log in so you can see exactly what it is. Hang on one second.
Okay, so this is the website. We also have a referral link that Grace put in. Either way is fine, but versus ZoomInfo, ZoomInfo basically is a lead. They empower you with a lead list. The difference between ZoomInfo and Coldlytics is that, with ZoomInfo, you pay no matter what. And I know, I think Steve on the call, you might be a ZoomInfo guy. You pay no matter what and you’re paying for a bulk lead. And this certainly serves some types of businesses very well. You’re getting contact information, LinkedIn profiles, and things like that.
50:32
Versus Coldlytics, they basically give you all these different credentials that you get to choose from. And there is, behind Coldlytics, some manpower. So it doesn’t instantly come to you. That is the beauty and benefit of ZoomInfo is that every lead you might want is already sitting in there and you can go get it instantly. Whereas Coldlytics, you do have to wait a couple of days. But if I’m looking for a very specific type of customer, certain location, I want access to their LinkedIn so I can find them on LinkedIn, I want their phone number, I want their email address, I want their information, Coldlytics you just pay for what you need.
And you pay, I think it’s 50 cents or, Grace, you can correct me if I’m wrong, maybe a little bit more, but you can do like small batch. So it’s just a little bit more affordable and you’re paying per use or per what you need versus a subscription-based like ZoomInfo. Does that make sense? So it’s basically a tool to empower you to build that list of who your target customer is.
Doug: All right, cool. Thank you.
Laura: Big, big fan of Coldlytics. Any other questions?
I also love Coldlytics for just pulling those lists and targeting. You can do lookalike audiences on ads. You can target specific people on ads. It’s a great tool for like, “Hey I know that this list of 100 people is exactly who I’m looking for.” I think there’s a minimum. You can’t have just 100, but if you had 1,000, then we would be able to get really good targeting on ads versus just trying to cast a wide net and figure it out that way. Better use of your spend on ads to be more direct with an audience.
Any questions? All right, well, I truly appreciate everyone who gets on these. It really makes it fun. This was my first to have to talk the whole time, which my husband says I have no problem doing, but I do enjoy the interaction and getting to speak with you guys. Anytime you want to have a chat, you can certainly reach out to me. We’ll get this posted and send the recording as well so you have it to lean into.
Thanks so much! Bye.
