Welcome to my December Traffic Report. To see November’s report, click here.
As traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur, at Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Plus, writing the report forces me to look! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.
As you can see from the chart above, overall visits were up 34.45% from 8,645 to 11,623 (a new record) and unique visits were up 42.82% from 4,615 to 6,591.
In looking deeper into where the traffic came from this month vs last, the biggest gains were as follows:
Direct traffic increased 74.77% from 2,699 to 4,717 visits
Twitter referrals increased 173.83% from 298 to 816
Facebook (mobile) referrals increased 446.94% from 49 to 268
Referrals from NathanBarry.com went from 0 to 351 (he helped me promote my book)
I suspect the reason Twitter and Facebook referrals were up so much was because I was aggressively promoting my Digital Marketing Handbook, as well as recruiting the help of others – and I’m happy to say that the book launch was a huge success!
Conversions
The conversions overview has always baffled me. It’s not a particularly hard report to create, however, it never agrees with the data that I get from Infusionsoft. Being as I trust Infusionsoft more than I trust GA, I’ve appended the report with the actual data.
Landing Pages
The conversion rate of our home page improved slightly, from 5.11% to 5.61% – although we didn’t make any changes to our home page.
Traffic Sources
As you can see, the largest portion of my traffic is from people typing in the URL – or at least this is my understanding of this report (if I’m wrong, I would love for you to leave the correct interpretation down in the comments).
A few months ago, we started to use campaign tracking links extensively in our emails, and you can see that emails to our list definitely account for a significant portion of our traffic. If you aren’t yet building a mailing list, you need to start now (check out our 2013 income report to see how incredibly valuable it is to have your own mailing list).
Referral Traffic
Social media is an absolutely wonderful tool for content promotion (a topic I cover extensively in my book) and in this report you can see that Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all made incremental contributions to overall traffic. What I cannot tell for sure is how many people saw our content on social media and then decided to type in the URL instead of clicking the link.
Summary
When it comes to understanding GA, I consider myself a complete neophyte. GA collects a ton of data; I wish I was better at interpreting it. That is part of the reason why we are going to publish traffic reports on an ongoing basis – we hope to get much better with our understanding of analytics.
If you are an analytics guru, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below as I, and the rest of our audience, would undoubtedly learn a thing or two!
I love content marketing and marketing automation and have created a lot of content here on my blog to share what I have learned. I have even written a book about it.
When done correctly, content marketing and marketing automation are extremely effective at capturing leads and nurturing them towards the point where a lead becomes a customer. With that said, if your business requires more than “add to cart” to make a sale, content marketing alone is not going to increase your revenue.
You still need to know how to actually talk to your prospect and ask them to buy.
The one thing that I haven’t written a single post about is how to sell; which, given that I have 20+ years of B2B selling experience, is pretty hilarious.
Today, that changes. As wonderful as content marketing is, it doesn’t land clients. Talking to people is what does that.
The headline I wrote is kind of a joke. The truth is that I don’t have some magic potion to persuade anyone to do anything they don’t want to do.
Noticed that I italicized that last bit, did you?
When I talk to a lead, I do have a very specific framework for the discussion because within 90 minutes of saying hello for the very first time, my goal is to close the sale and get paid.
I don’t want to write proposals and I don’t want to make follow up calls.
Experience has taught me one simple concept: qualified leads, if given answers to their questions, are generally ready to make a purchase decision in a very short period of time.
Virtually every time I have reached the end of my first sales call and not got a yes, I don’t end up getting the yes, no matter how many follow up calls that I make (note: throughout my career I’ve sold primarily to small business and there is almost never a committee involved in the buying process).
The Framework for Success
So….what does this framework look like? Good question.
It’s not complicated, but it is highly effective. Out of the last 4 times I’ve used it, 3 have said yes, and one is still thinking about it. I’ll bet he doesn’t buy from me.
Before I get into the details of the framework, I want to stress something incredibly important.
During a sales interview (what some would call a “sales call”), I almost never make a statement. Instead, virtually everything that comes out of my mouth is a question. Only when I get to the end of the conversation, assuming I have built a high level of trust, do I dare to make a statement or two.
Why is that? Simple. If I say something to you, you can (and will) doubt it. But, if you say it, it has to be true. Right?
Ok, so, with that said…let’s dive into the frame work.
Phase 1 – Setting up the Call
In the first part of the call, I want to accomplish a few things:
demonstrate to them that I’m not like every other nitwit who just starts verbally puking all over the place
let them know what to expect (so they will let their guard down and relax)
get a feel for their needs/wants/desires and motivation to change
Here’s what I generally say…
“Mr X, thanks for getting on the call with me today. What I’d like to do, if it’s ok with you, is begin by asking you enough questions to help me understand what you are trying to accomplish, why it is important, and why you might want to change what you are doing now. Once I have gained a better understanding of your current situation, I’m going to introduce you to a framework for growing a business, and if you agree that this framework applies to your business, we’re going to use it to guide the remainder of our discussion today. Does that sound ok to you?”
By setting expectations and giving them an idea of what is going to happen next, I have helped my prospect to:
relax (I’m not going to push anything on them)
be open to my questions and understand why I’m asking them
be curious about how I can help them
Before we move onto phase 2, I want to remind you of one thing: I can start a call like this because the prospect has contacted me to ask for the call. That’s where the content marketing part really pays off. If I didn’t do all the content marketing, they wouldn’t have ever found me in the first place!
As a side note, if you’d like to learn more about the approach that I’m describing, I highly recommend a book called Upside Down Selling by Ian Altman.
Phase 2 – Ask Why They Took the Call
Once I have set the stage for where I plan to take the conversation, the next thing that I want to get a feel for is how motivated someone is to solve their problems. To accomplish this, I usually ask, “Why did you book this call with me today?” and then I follow that one up with “What are you hoping to get out of today’s call?”
Based upon the answers to these questions, I generally have a pretty good feel for what their agenda is, as well as how motivated they are to make a change. If I feel the motivation is low, I will most likely ask more probing questions until I find what their hot button is (a hot button is the pain they are trying to solve).
Phase 3 – Conduct a Self Assessment
Now that I know what they want and how motivated they are, I need to gain a deeper understanding of how they feel about their business now. This is where I use my Lifecycle Self Assessment tool.
As all my meetings are done online (why drive to go see someone when you can do a face to face meeting online?), I direct them to the web page above and ask them if they are at all familiar with the concept. Most have heard of it because they have usually consumed a fair amount of my content (see…there’s that content marketing stuff helping out again).
I then take a few minutes to walk them through the seven steps shown on the image above and ask them if they feel that this is a suitable framework for growing their business. Thus far, no one has ever said no.
When you go to the Lifecycle Self Assessment page, you’ll notice that I have a form under the image with a rating scale of 1 to 10 beside each of the seven steps. The goal here is to get my prospect to rate themselves on each of the seven steps. Each time I do this, plenty of discussion ensues, and, most often, their self assessment results in fairly low scores for the first three steps.
Can you image what would happen if, instead of asking them what their score was, I told them what I thought their score was, based upon looking at their website? It would probably be a short call…and they would very likely try to defend their sub-standard marketing.
The reason the self assessment works so well is because they are the ones doing the rating.
That isn’t the only reason it works so well though. The other reason this approach is so effective is that it affords me the opportunity to ask a lot of questions, and the more intelligent questions I ask, the more likely they are to continue to trust that I know what I’m doing.
Smart people don’t generally ask dumb questions, right? (oh, look… I just asked you a question instead of making a statement)
What Do You Want to Do Next?
Once we’ve completed the self assessment, we are normally 20 to 40 minutes into the sales interview and, by way of my questions, I have had numerous opportunities to display my “marketing smarts” to my prospective client.
The other thing that has been happening is that my prospect’s apprehension has largely been replaced with a desire to improve upon the areas where they scored themselves poorly.
At this point, I will usually say something like this, “Now that we have identified the areas of most need and I’ve given you a few examples of how I and past guests on my show have addresses these challenges in our businesses, we need to come up with a game plan to solve these challenges for you, right?”
They say yes.
“Ok, well, what would you like to do next?”
These 9 words, if used at the right time in a sales interview (trust has been built, needs have been identified, motivation is present) are incredibly powerful because it puts the onus on my prospect to give me an answer that will help them to move forward.
No one ever gets to this point in the call and says, “I want to think about it“. While I suppose they could say that at this point, I have never had anyone do it.
Their response almost always is to ask me what the first step of working together is.
When they do that, they have made an emotional decision to work with me. Now we just need to create the logic to support the emotional decision.
Earlier in this post, I made this statement: qualified leads, if given answers to their questions, are generally ready to make a purchase decision in a very short period of time.
A big part of being qualified is being able to afford what I’m offering. Rookie salespeople leave the price to the very end because they feel that they need to sell hard prior to announcing the price.
This is the wrong approach.
Instead of waiting to the end, once I have established that they have a need and are motivated, I will, at the earliest opportunity, let them know what working with me usually costs. By getting the price out in the open early on, you are removing it from being a possible objection later on.
So, with that said, here’s how I usually wind up the call…
When they tell me what they want to do next, I respond by telling them what phase one normally includes and ask them if they are ready to proceed. If they say yes, I send them a payment link and they pay by credit card.
It’s just that simple and, as I mentioned before, 3 of my last 4 presentations have ended this way.
If this sounds too easy to you, remember a few things about how my business works:
I produce a lot of content to position myself as an expert
People find me because we are good at promoting our content
They read or watch a lot of my stuff before they call me
They already know they have a need and have probably completed 60% or more of the buyer’s journey before we speak
When we do speak, I follow a proven framework (proven over my 20+ years of selling) to move them from “interested” to “ready to proceed”
Making a sale is the natural conclusion of a meaningful discussion with a qualified prospect. If they aren’t qualified, my chance of closing the sale are somewhere near zero.
I have recently decided to become a stalker, and I think you need to do the same.
Say what?
Before you go thinking I’ve lost my mind and am about to become some kind of creeper, let me clarify that I’m only using the word “stalker” as a euphemism for a methodical approach to expanding your professional network!
Why You Need to Network Every Day
For many people (me included), the thought of going to a networking event to “make small talk” with strangers holds very little appeal. Having said that, over the last year, one of the most important realizations that I have made is that, even though I run an online business, networking with others is a “must-do” activity…which is why I have included it in my content marketer’s daily activity checklist (free download).
When you spend time getting to know other people, you are creating all sorts of opportunities. Here’s just a few:
You can learn from them
You can get referrals from them
They can help you to promote your content
They can help you to promote your products
They can introduce you to other people who can do the same
Obviously, to get results from your networking, you need to go into it with a “help others firsts” mindset, and you actually need to target the right people – and that is where having a Stalker List comes into play.
How to Create a Stalker List
In a post I published the other day, I described how you can use Followerwonk to help you build a list…but what I neglected to mention was a few other ways to do it…plus, in today’s post, I want to share with you how to use it.
In addition to using Followerwonk, you might also want to try some or all of the following ways:
Go to Amazon and find a list of authors who have written books that would be of interest to your audience
Google terms like “top 50 social media influencers” or “top 50 marketing blogs”, etc…
Copy the title of a blog post that would be of interest to your audience and then search on Twitter for people that have shared that post
See who some of your favorite influencers are following on Twitter
One thing to keep in mind. Keep your list short, probably no more than 20 names. Then, as you start to get traction with some of them, you can move them onto a “maintain” list and add some new people you’d like to get to know.
How to Use Your Stalker List
One you have you list, you should do the following:
Follow them on Twitter
Circle them on Google+
Connect on LinkedIn
Friend on Facebook
Comment on the blog
Share their content
Retweet their tweets
Comment on their Facebook page
When you do reach out to these people, don’t be creepy. Don’t adore them. Instead, find ways to add value to their conversations. Treat them with respect and have confidence in what you have to offer. You won’t become pals with all of them, but some of them will end up becoming valuable business allies, and when that happens, the benefits can be incredible.
What do you think?
Do you have comments or questions? Please use the comment form below. If you have a strong opinion one way or the other, I’d like to hear it.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/BI_Images-31.jpg9141112Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-30 06:00:072014-01-09 11:28:104 Ways You Can Become a Stalker
Between the work I do via our consulting division and the mastermind group that I lead, I find myself spending a great of time talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart: How to develop a content marketing strategy.
It’s a topic that I’m very passionate about and I love having these conversations; however, as I’ve only been sharing my thoughts via one-to-one conversations up to this point, I thought it was about time that I stood in front of my whiteboard and filmed what I have been explaining to client after client.
Prior to creating the video, I had a few goals that I wanted to achieve. They are:
Create a video that will help people who aren’t clients to get started on the right foot
Create a video that I can have my clients watch before we do our kick off session (saves time)
Create a video that I can use as a case study for ranking and traffic on Youtube (case study to come)
How and why to spend time researching a target market first
How and why to define a buyer persona
How and why to create a unique selling proposition and content to support it
My Youtube Case Study
A couple of years ago when I was first starting out with content marketing, I created a video that I titled, “How to Start a Business with No Money“. Since publishing this video, it has been watched 426,419 times and is ranked #1 for its keyword on Youtube.
Back then, I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing (from a marketing perspective), but I did know my topic well, so I just fired up my camera and started to explain what was on my mind. I’m happy to say that my unsophisticated approach actually worked quite well. Near as I can tell, the main reason why the video is now ranked #1 on Youtube is because it has received 4,929 thumbs up votes.
In addition to the recognition generated from the 426,419 views, the video has also generated thousands of leads for me. As of this writing, I get about 20 leads a day from this video, and those leads translate into about $800/mo in revenue from sales of my information products.
When it comes to passive income, the video has been a raging success!
Now the question is: can I replicate my success?
Since publishing my new content marketing strategy video today, I kept track of everything that I have done to promote the video, and, over the next month as I continue to promote it, I will keep a log of everything that I do so that, in a month, I can publish a case study with the results of my experiment.
If you are not yet a subscribe and want to notified when that post is live, please be sure and become a subscriber today.
My hope is that, like my earlier video, this video will eventually rank #1 for “content marketing strategy” and turn into a passive income workhorse like the old video has. To help me with that, I would love it if you give it a “thumbs up” on Youtube and share it on your social networks. Thanks, you rock!
A few days ago, a new client wrote to me to ask for some advice about getting started in a niche that he was looking at going after. I thought his question was such a good one that I decided to publish it here, along with the answer that I gave him.
My Client’s Question
To protect the privacy of my client, I have omitted certain keywords from his question below.
As I am doing the strategy work we talked about and cruising the web for places that [type of people] “hang out” I am finding that there seems to be a major gap in the Podcast area within [industry name].
I am looking for a place where I can listen to interviews of top salespeople or new salespeople who have had success and frankly not seeing anything worth my time.
Most of what is out there seems to be the “talking head” or “talk at me” and “train me” type of content. I wonder if it might make sense to set up a “podcast” where I would interview top [type of person] and [other type of person] as will as newbies with a millennial type “start up” perspective coming into [industry name]. I am seeing some trends in the industry where people are beginning to think about [industry name] differently in more of a start up type of manner and also seeing it becoming more attractive to Millennials as a career.
Any quick thoughts on the best way to validate my hypothesis?
My Answer
The best way to test is to collect data. Here’s what to do.
1. Set up a landing page (use LeadPages.net) to describe the podcast (sales copy/headline must be tight) and see how many people opt in. To make this work, the sales copy must be all benefit, benefit, benefit. Treat the launch of the podcast like a launch of a movie or an apple product. Both make a big deal out of “coming soon!”
2. Use your list and/or Facebook or LinkedIn paid ads to drive traffic to the landing page.
If it converts, you are onto something. You may also want to run a split test while you are doing this. Optimizely is good for that.
The ‘manual’ way of doing this is to survey your list with survey monkey, or actual phone calls. You might want to start with 10 phone calls and if that goes well, then do 1 and 2 above. Your call.
If you really want to test demand, put a buy button on the page, that, when clicked, takes them to a “product not ready but launching soon, so get on the early bird list and you’ll get benefit, benefit, benefit” If people click the buy button, that means they want it bad enough to pay for it.
No one has a monopoly on good ideas, so half the reason that I published this post was to see if anyone else cared to share their thoughts or comments on my client’s question.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.png00Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-20 03:00:142014-10-01 09:56:21Digital Marketing Strategy: Q&A on How to Get Started in a Niche
A few months ago, we made an effort to do a better job of sharing and promoting our content. The initial results were quite impressive, so we hired a full time VA who primarily focuses on content promotion, and we’ve continued to refine and revise our strategies.
We posted on SlideShare on a Monday. We spent a full day tweeting about the SlideShare once an hour for 24 hours.
This probably had the biggest affect on initiating traffic, since Twitter is a significant source of our traffic.
We also shared the SlideShare with LinkedIn groups that we belong to, as well as on Pinterest, our Facebook page, and on google+.
We had hoped to do all the sharing on Monday, but due to miscommunication (and our VA helping us working in a different time zone), this all happened over the course of 48 hours, mostly on Tuesday and then Wednesday morning.
We didn’t reach the front page until later on Wednesday, and stayed there until Thursday afternoon.
Lessons Learned
At the start of this post, I mentioned that we didn’t land on the front page on the first try. After our first SlideShare was viewed a few hundred times (with no large boost in traffic to our site), we spent more time researching what makes SlideShares popular. Instructive (how to) shares seemed to fare pretty well.
Our goal going forward is to make future SlideShares just as informative, as well as more visually appealing.
What Do You Think?
If you have comments or questions, please take a moment to leave them down in the comments. You will get an answer.
Enter to Win a FREE Copy of My Digital Marketing Handbook
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/SlideShareHomePage.png10221178Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-19 06:00:492015-12-07 17:32:29How I Landed on the Front Page of SlideShare
Back in mid-October, I published our very first traffic report after seeing a huge boost in traffic that resulted when I applied some new content promotion strategies that were shared with me.
As traffic generation is a challenge that we all face, I’ve decided to make a habit of the monthly traffic report (plus, starting in January, we’re going to start publishing income reports, so if you don’t want to miss those be sure to become a subscriber).
The goal of publishing these reports is to provide you with more transparency about what is and isn’t working for us here at Bright Ideas. If you think this is a cool idea, please be sure and share this post.
As you can see from the above report, overall visits were down 14.33% and unique visits were down 3.80%. Not as good as we would have liked, however, given that November’s traffic was up 52.85% from September – a huge gain for just 60 days – the results aren’t as bad as they might first appear.
Conversions
November 2013 Conversions Overview
The graph for conversions above is a bit confusing due to some changes we made in the goals we are tracking. As you can see, the blue line (November results) dropped off quite a bit on November 20th. The reason for that is that I stopped counting conversions that originate from my old blog as that blog, while “dead,” still gets about 150 conversions a week from a Youtube video that I have that gets about 2,000 views a day.
Being as the traffic from that video isn’t really my target audience any more, I thought it was kind of silly to be counting conversions in my goals report.
Now, regarding the big uptick in the yellow line…it went up a bunch on November 15th because I didn’t really use Google Analytics (GA) to track conversions very much prior to then.
Confused yet? Hopefully not…and in future reports, it should be much more straight forward. If you have questions about this, please use the comment form at the bottom of this page.
Landing Pages
November 2013 Landing Page Overview
The big win for this month was the 234% increase in the conversion rate of our home page. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that in October, I gave the blog a facelift….and you’ll also know that the new look totally bombed from a conversion perspective (oops), so I quickly released the redesign that you see today.
Unlike a “traditional” landing page, the home page has many calls to action, and the only one that I’m tracking in this report is actual conversions (new subscribers) from the home page. What I am not tracking in this report is when a new visitor clicks one of the calls to action on the home page and then becomes a subscriber from the second page they view. If I had more time and was better with GA, I’d probably get this set up…but, I don’t, so this is all I have for the time being.
Traffic Sources
November 2013 Traffic Sources
As you can see, the largest portion of my traffic is from people typing in the URL – or at least this is my understanding of this report (if I’m wrong, I would love for you to leave the correct interpretation down in the comments).
A few months ago, we started to use campaign tracking links extensively in our emails, and you can see that emails to our list definitely account for a significant portion of our traffic. If you aren’t yet building a mailing list, you need to start now (when I release our December income report, you are going to see how incredibly valuable it is to have your own mailing list).
Referral Traffic
November 2013 Referral Traffic
Social media is an absolutely wonderful tool for content promotion (a topic I cover extensively in my book) and in this report you can see that Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all made incremental contributions to overall traffic. What I cannot tell for sure, is how many people saw our content on social media and then decided to type in the URL instead of clicking the link.
Summary
When it comes to understanding GA, I consider myself a complete neophyte. GA collects a ton of data; I wish I was better at interpreting it. That is part of the reason why we are going to publish traffic reports on an ongoing basis – we hope to get much better with our understanding of analytics.
If you are an analytics guru, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below as I, and the rest of our audience, would undoubtedly learn a thing or two!
What Do You Think?
If you have comments or questions, please take a moment to leave them down in the comments. You will get an answer.
Enter to Win a FREE Copy of My Digital Marketing Handbook
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/TrafficReport.jpg225690Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-17 01:00:182015-12-07 20:08:40Bright Ideas November 2013 Traffic Report
Sometimes I’m not as disciplined as I’d like. When first start my day, there are tasks that are absolutely critical to growing my business that I know I must do, yet despite this, I sometimes forget…or get distracted by something else.
Sound familiar?
How to Stay on Task – Day After Day
Last night after my wife and I finished watching Homeland (we’ve just finished episode 2 of season 1), my brain decided it was going to go into “bright ideas” overdrive and one of the ideas that surfaced was the need to create a daily activity checklist.
Pilots use checklists. So do astronauts. I’m sure there are many other types of people that use them as well. Why? Simple, they don’t want to forget anything.
We actually use a lot of checklists already. We have checklists for podcast post production, writing blog posts, blog post editing, blog post promotion, onboarding a new client. You name it, we have a checklist for it.
Oddly enough, prior to last night, I’d not yet created a checklist of daily activities. Go figure.
My Daily Activity Checklist
Bad habits, distractions, and laziness be gone. I now have the first draft of a daily activity checklist to keep me on task.
In the checklist above, you will notice that I referred to something called a stalker list. This is not a list of people that you want to creep on! Instead, this is a list of the influencers who you’d like to build a relationship with. There are plenty of ways to find these people and one of the ways that I’ve found is to use Followerwonk by Moz.
With Followerwonk, you can easily find people who are influential in just about any niche you can think of. To see how to do it, simply have a look at the screenshot below.
If you aren’t a major influencer yourself, I suggest you start by targeting people who are slightly above your level of influence, as opposed to shooting for the stars.
This was a tactic that we used to recruit other bloggers to help spread the word about The Digital Marketing Handbook. We used Followerwonk to find out who we needed to connect with and then I had my VA comment on two posts and tweet those posts out (using my Twitter account). After that, my VA (using my email account) would send them an email to ask if they’d be interested in reviewing my book.
Because we’d focused on helping them first (comments and shares on their posts), when we emailed them, it wasn’t a cold email and many wrote back saying they’d love to review the book…as well as share it on their own social networks.
What Do You Think?
Even though I have interviewed over 100 entrepreneurs on my podcast, I’m well aware that I still have plenty to learn. If you have ideas for daily activities that a content marketer should be adding to this checklist, please share them in the comments below.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DailyActivityChecklist.jpg341690Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-13 08:50:362013-12-13 10:56:24How to Stay Focused with a Daily Activity Checklist
At a recent business networking event that I attended, I had the opportunity to be a firsthand witness to a “power networker” named Dave. Dave was a networking machine and he worked the room like no one I’ve ever seen, passing out business cards left and right.
Dave was amazing. In fact, he was the talk of the room.
Problem was that none of the “talk” was flattering. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. In just under an hour, Dave had managed to become the most annoying person in the room.
Do you think that anyone who received one of Dave’s cards would ever call him? Do you think that in the short conversations that Dave had with each person that he devoted any time to attempting to understand the problems or challenges faced by the person he was talking to?
Hardly. Dave was only interested in one thing: passing out as many cards as possible. After all, sales is just a numbers game, right?
WRONG.
Today, the way to successfully attract clients is not to interrupt them with your sales messages. The way to attract clients today is to create content that is actually useful.
In his book Youtility, Jay Baer completely hit the nail on the head. Smart marketing is about HELP not HYPE.
In the “old days” we would begin our buyer’s journey by reaching out and talking to a real person. We did this because we wanted to learn more about the company and create a bond of some kind.
When was the last time you reached out and talked to a live person at the very beginning of your research process? In my case, it’s been a very long time! The days of one-to-one communications early in the buyer’s journey are OVER.
Nowadays, the buyer’s journey starts off with online research and by the time you or I talk to a prospect, 60% of their homework is done. Customers are smart and they are stealthy. They are rigorously evaluating us without our even knowing they exist. IF we pass their sniff test, ONLY THEN do we stand a chance of actually speaking with them.
Content is Mission Critical
Content Marketing is the process of creating content that our prospects actually want or need. If you aren’t publishing high quality, helpful content, your competitors are probably eating your lunch.
To be successful with content, you must think carefully about the customer buying cycle and then create content to meet the needs of people in each phase.
The first phase has the largest number of potential buyers so you should begin with content that drives interest and awareness. We’ll call this top of the funnel content.
The next phase is the middle of the funnel. Here you want to focus on increasing engagement as well as answering questions about what you sell and how much it is.
The final phase is the bottom of the funnel. This is the place where you want to getting into the nitty gritty of all the frequently asked questions that are aligned with the buying process.
Attracting Buyers with Content
High quality content connects your buyers with solutions. (image source: 123rf.com)
Content marketing has one purpose: attracting buyers.
Unlike paid advertising, where you are attempting to interrupt buyers from whatever they are doing (so they will pay attention to you), the goal of content marketing is to attract buyers who are already searching for solutions to the problems they have.
Does’t that seem like a much smarter idea?
To succeed with content marketing, you have to shift your mindset from “how can we sell them” to “how can we help them”. People are tired of being sold and if that is your approach (like Dave), they will avoid you. However, if you focus on providing help, not only will people trust you more, but they will also help you to spread the word on their social networks.
Here at Bright Ideas, we walk our talk and provide a steady stream of the most helpful content that we possibly can. On this site there are hundreds of blog posts and interviews that are jam packed with content that is genuinely helpful.
How do I know it’s helpful? Because I get at least one email or tweet a day (from people I’ve never heard of) thanking me for creating content that is so helpful. My audience also regularly buys our products and services, so I can assure that being “helpful” definitely pays the bills.
Don’t just take my word for it though. According to BtoB Magazine, “Content Marketing” is one of the top priorities for marketing in 2014.
Check out the total number of searches for “content marketing”. From January of 2001 through to today, the trend has been steadily increasing.
Still not convinced? Here’s a bunch more statistics:
The Bright Ideas Traffic Report: Amazing Results From Effective Content Promotion
How Content Marketing Has Forever Changed How to Attract Clients and How You Can Take Advantage of This Shift
How to Get Started With Content Marketing
Getting started with content marketing is actually very easy to do.
Step 1: Find out what your customers are interested in learning more about.
To do this, I strongly suggest that you invest some time to actually call your customers and ask them. There is no substitute for first hand research like this.
If you are too lazy to call people, then I’d suggest sending out a survey and using plenty of open ended questions. Multiple choice is OK, but what you really want is to hear the answers in your customer’s own words so that you can use these phrases for keyword research.
Listen to your customers! (image source: 123rf.com)
Now that you have some idea of key phrases that your customers are using, make a list of them and start to use tools like Google trends and the Google keyword tool to gain insight into the trends and search volume for these key phrases. The data you uncover from doing this will help you to determine which topics you should write about.
If you are just starting out and don’t yet have any customers, use Google to find some discussion forums for the topic you are researching and take note of the questions people are asking. For questions that you see showing up over and over, go write a blog post that answers that question. Now you have a page you can tell people in the forums about and that will drive traffic to your site.
Step 2: Create content to provide helpful advice and answers to the questions your prospects are asking
Now that you have a list of questions, write a blog post that answers each question. It doesn’t have to be a long post and you don’t need to be a world-class writer. You need only be HELPFUL.
If you are brand new to writing, I’d suggest you look at other blogs in your niche and see which posts of theirs have received the most comments and social shares. Use these posts as a guide to helping you to create an effective post.
Generally speaking a good post will go something like this:
Overview of the problem (this is why you should read this)
Overview of the solution
Proof that the solution works (your proof or proof supplied by others)
Call to action (what your reader should do next)
Want to Learn More?
As you might guess, there are plenty of addition details, tips, tricks, and hacks to becoming a successful content marketer and to help you discover them, I have written a book that will take you from zero to a steady stream of new customers-all from content marketing. Plus, so that you can get an even bigger bang for your content marketing buck, I have devoted two chapters to how you can add something called marketing automation in with your content marketing.
Have questions? Please use the comment form below.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/SprinterOnBlocks.jpg552828Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-12 06:00:162015-12-07 17:38:38How to Get Started With Content Marketing
Converting proposals is key to surviving and growing your marketing agency. Since most of the time agencies are under insane deadlines, most people don’t put much attention into conversion until it’s too late. The fact is, every agency loses an average of 25-percent existing business each year. This is not their fault but this is the average churn rate over the last 30 years.
This only makes it more important that you convert as many proposals as you can. You worked so hard getting the client to contact you and invite you to do a pitch, why would you ease up now?
The cover letter is 35 percent of your work
One of the most important parts of a proposal is the cover letter. Do you know that over 35 percent of proposals are not read past the first page? I treat the cover letter as a landing page where I had to get their attention to read further. It’s where you have to convince the reader to keep reading.
In the cover letter you need to do the following:
Explain that you understand their problem and you have proposed a solution.
Quickly explain what you are about and why you do it.
Ask them for feedback and encourage them to ask questions.
Make sure the cover letter is brief, under a page.
Next up is the Executive Summary
After the cover letter, I immediately dive into more details and go through the executive summary:
What is the primary focus of this proposal?
Explain to them that you have researched and engaged in meetings to discuss their goals and requirements.
Tell them about your experience, building confidence in being able to deliver.
Define the estimated time it will take for the project.
You’re building them up and getting them to believe you are right for them.
Show how you will deliver
After the executive summary, I dive into the deliverables. You will want to categorize services into sections, depending on your business. For a marketing/web design proposal, my categories are creative services, marketing, and technology.
Be very descriptive in each (especially important if you are talking about something like web design).
Tell them about your methodology so they understand the process.
Add images where possible so not text heavy, but do not get carried away.
List out all the deliverables, i.e. How many versions or pages they will get, etc.
List out services that they may have not asked for but that could be a good compliment. Label that session: Optional services.
Next, I would summarize all the deliverables and services. Make sure to list all the services in almost a ledger style with the name and price. I would also recommend to categorize this into sections as well as one time fees and recurring fees like hosting and SEM. This method makes it easy for the client to understand.
After you tell the client the services you are going to do, you can know starting talking about your company and why you exist, awards and the people that will be involved on the project. You are trying to let them get a good understanding of your company and culture, because people do business with people that like and get along with.
Close that new business
Last is the contract section. Most people separate the proposal and the contract but I always want to have everything together to make it easier for the client-easier for them to execute the proposal.
If you want to learn even more ways to increase your proposal conversions, check out Jason’s free video on how his company converted 80 percent of his proposals. You will see how how Solar Velocity achieved such a high proposal close rate, and get to look at the exact proposal that they used to close businesses like AT&T, AFLAC and Hitachi below. Check it out.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Handshake.jpg341450Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-11 06:00:472013-12-12 12:42:21How to Convert 80% of Your Proposals
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Back then, I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing (from a marketing perspective), but I did know my topic well, so I just fired up my camera and started to explain what was on my mind. I’m happy to say that my unsophisticated approach actually worked quite well. Near as I can tell, the main reason why the video is now ranked #1 on Youtube is because it has received 4,929 thumbs up votes.
