Resources Mentioned

• The Marketing Agency Blueprint
• The Marketing Performance Blueprint

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Transcript

Trent:

Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome back to episode number168 of the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. And this is the podcast where we help marketers to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business.

If you’re a marketer and you are looking for proven tactics and strategies as opposed to untested theories and random ideas on how to increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase sales, well guess what, you are in the right place.

So how do I make good on that promise? Well the way that I do it is I bring on proven experts and I get them to share with you and with me the results they have achieved. And then we unpack those results and I get them to share all of the exact tactics and strategies that they use to achieve those results.

So it is kind of like getting the opportunity to look over the shoulders of somebody that has already achieved the results that you would like to achieve and merely replicating the things that they have done, and of course adapted for your own business.

On the show with me today is a fellow by the name of Paul Roetzer. He is the founder of PR 20/20, another Hubspot partner, much like my agency, Groove Digital Marketing. And Paul, this is his second time on the show, I interviewed him way back in episode number 35 and we talked about how to build a hybrid agency. In this particular episode we are going to dive a little deeper and talk about some of the painful lessons that Paul experienced with his firm, especially in the first year.

He experienced a 100% churn of his customer base and the lessons that he learned and some of the tools that he developed. And whether or not you’re another agency or you’re a brand and you are thinking about inbound marketing for yourselves and have no interest in working with an agency, I promise you that there are some very, very important lessons in the conversation that Paul and I are going to have.

We are going to talk about reporting and we are going to talk about how to ensure the C-Suite gets the information that they are looking for. We are going to talk about how to get buy-in across the organization. We are going to talk about how to make sure that the people on your team have realistic expectations.

We are going to talk about the number one area where Paul sees people making mistakes and that is in developing a content strategy. Not just creating the content but the actual strategy behind the content. And how to develop a strategy that will ensure the highest probability that the leads that you gather from your content assets, actually successfully move through the marketing funnel that you have designed.

And there are some very important things that you need to get right in order for that to happen. So we are going to welcome Paul in just a second. Before we do that, my very quick announcement is if you are looking to learn more about inbound marketing in addition to listening to my podcasts, I have a library of ebooks, guides, and webinar recordings and so forth and it is all complimentary.

You can get to it all at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/resources and of course there is our blog there as well where we blog extensively about inbound marketing.

So with that said please join me in welcoming Paul to the show.

Hey Paul, welcome back.

Paul:

What’s going on, good to talk with you again.

Trent:

Yeah, it has been a good long time, I think you were one of my earliest interviews on the Bright Ideas Podcast which was as I just mentioned to you before we hit the record button, 150+ interviews ago. So I am sure that much has changed and you have learned lots of new things, as have I. So I am pretty keen to have you back on the show and talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned from some of the potholes and skid marks that we have gone through along the way.

Paul:

Yeah absolutely, it is good to talk and I think last time we were talking about building agencies and this time, who knows what we’ll cover.

Trent:

[Laughing] Thankfully I have a couple of ideas. Before we get into that though, for the folks that maybe aren’t familiar with you, just briefly introduce yourself and what do you do.

Paul:

Paul Roetzer, founder, CEO of PR 20/20 which is an inbound marketing agency, we were Hubspot’s first agency partner back in 2007/2008 before they built up their VAR program as it exists today with 2000+ agencies around the world.

That was kind of our evolution into the inbound agency world, is when we started working with Hubspot. And I have written a couple of books, The Marketing Agency Blueprint came out in late 2011, helped build up modern marketing agencies. And then The Marketing Performance Blueprint which just came out in August 2014 and it is a story about the convergence of marketing talent, tech and strategy to build performance driven organizations.

Trent:

And that is something that we are going to talk a little bit about. Now before we get into that, one of the things that you and I talked about in our pre interview was how all of the clients that you landed in your first year, building your hybrid agency, the industry term we use is churned. They are not around anymore.

Paul:

Yeah, we had a lot of that in the early going and as I started the agency in 2005 I would say it became an issue in 2008/2009, right around the time we started working with Hubspot. And what happened was our growth started accelerating and we were taking on any client that came our way and at the point I think we were naive enough to believe that if we followed a methodology for doing marketing, for doing inbound marketing well then we can help anybody.

And what we realized was that there is lots of factors that influenced whether or not a company could be successful and whether or not we could be successful helping them. So we took on a lot of clients in those days that in retrospect we were never going to be able to help for a lot of different reasons. But yeah there was a big growth area in 2008/2009 for us and none of those clients that we brought on in that period are around today as clients.

Trent:

So let’s jump into some of those factors for success because I think it is important that people understand that inbound marketing doesn’t work for everybody. And so what did you identify as the criteria that needed to be in place in order for you to have a successful long term relationship; which is the by-product of the client actually getting the results they are looking for?

Paul:

Right, so what we did is, in those days we were using Survey Monkey to do discovery research with potential clients. We would send them a questionnaire, there was like 30 questions; mostly qualitative responses. And we would take that and try and then gauge whether or not we can help them be successful or achieve the metrics that they were targeting.

We realised that was a very unscientific way to do it and it wasn’t scalable. So we actually, in 2011, built a different way to do it and we created a product called Marketing Score which became an online assessment tool. It’s a free tool people can use. Within there we broke it into ten sections, so there are things like business cores, audiences, marketing performance, lead sources, team strength, tech utilization, all these different areas we knew affected a company’s ability to achieve their performance potential.

And then within there, there’s a 130 or so factors, and so what we did is we built this tool where the marketers themselves or the executives can go in and rate themselves on 0 – 10 scale for each of these factors. And then what it does is it produces visualizations of where their strengths and weaknesses lie within the organization.

So out of those 130 or so factors we have a core group of probably twelve to fifteen that we know are critical for every organization and so we now are very scientific in our approach to say for example, financial stability, we learned the hard way that that is extremely important to our ability to help a business because the companies that are financially unstable function in a very desperate way and they do things and they require things of their agencies that aren’t in the best long term interest of the company.

They often know that but it doesn’t matter because they are trying to hit short term goals. So there’s these general factors that would be their overall reach, do they have a subscriber base, do they have decent traffic coming in to their site? Those sorts of things help us assess whether or not their expectations are realistic and in line with the resources they are willing to commit to marketing.

Trent:

What would be some of the other factors like you mentioned there is twelve or fifteen, just rattle them off by name for let’s say the top ten.

Paul:

That is a good question off the top of your head [laughing]. So what we would do is if you look at it like let’s say your funnel, so if we think about the potential in terms of the marketing funnel, at the top we have brand, so let’s say that there is social reach subscribers and website traffic would be really important at that stage; then in the lead section of the funnel we have lead volume/ lead quality would be really important.

So if they want to achieve 100% growth, if we look at those first two sections there and those five or six factors we have a pretty good idea whether or not the 100% growth is actually feasible. Then on to their conversions, like cost of their customer acquisition currently, their lead to sale conversion rate right now, and then down into the loyalty section of the funnel we may look at things like customer lifetime value and retention rate.

So those are funnel metrics, but then foundationally we are looking at their marketing technology stack, like do they have a CRM system in place, do they have marketing automation, do they have a CMS system? That becomes critical because again if a company is looking to achieve very aggressive growth goals and yet they don’t have the foundational pieces in place. Then no matter what you do as a marketer, as an agency, you can only have so much impact.

Trent:

Yeah absolutely, so when a company discovers you as a result your inbound marketing and they engage in a conversation of, “Hey can you help us or what can you do for us?” Or any of the number of phrases that they use, where do you fit in putting them through this “marketing grader”, I think is what you called it? How does that fit into the sales process?

Paul:

So for us, Marketing Score is the first piece, we don’t proactively go looking for any new business. We will turn nine next year as an agency. Every client we have ever brought in was an inbound lead, it was either a referral or someone came in through our website. Once someone reaches out to us, the first thing we ask them to do is take the fifteen or twenty minutes to go through and complete Marketing Score.

And then once they do that we’ll go through and do an analysis of their responses. We can actually have multiple people within the company take it, let’s say there is a Chief Marketing Officer, maybe the CEO is involved if it is a small to midsize business, founder maybe, sales director. We can actually do a gap analysis based on different perspectives.

For example in early testing of Marketing Score we had a Chief Marketing officer take it and he said, “Wow, I’d be really fascinated to see what our CEO thinks of our marketing team, our marketing tech.” Because the CMO was brand new, like three months into the job, but the CEO was the previous CMO. So the CEO would have far greater insight, so the way that they rated themselves was completely different.

The CMO thought he had a really strong marketing team and let’s say like he gave a 63% overall. The CEO rated it as like a 22% or some ridiculous gap in their own assessment. And so what we realised is if we were only talking to the CMO, he may not think they need as much outside support as they actually do, where the CEO was looking at it with a realistic expectation of, “Our team is not capable of doing all of these things, we not to outsource all of that.”

So rather than a $5000 budget, they may need a $15,000 budget. So that is kind of the process we go through, we have them do a self assessment. We’ll go out and do some additional discovery work, we’ll go look at their social profiles, we’ll ask for access to their analytics like Google Analytics specifically. And then if they have an automation system we usually want to be able to take a look at that to get a general gauge of what they’re doing, how their lists are set up.

And then we’ll go through and build a proposal and present it. We usually spend, I don’t know what the average is today but I would say it is somewhere between four and six hours on business development. And that is it, we rarely invest more than ten hours to close a new account.

Trent:

And what does the sales cycle look like typically from the time that they contact you to the time that they sign?

Paul:

It depends, I would say it is usually less than 30 days, like the larger enterprises as you and I have talked about, there’s more involved with large enterprise contracts. But normally when we get the call they are ready to start. They usually already know that they want to work with us.

They may be looking at one or two other people but generally speaking they’ve come to us for very specific needs and they know our capabilities; a lot of times with Hubspot they are looking for an agency that can really manage their automation solution and help them maximise their value they get out of Hubspot.

So they’ve already come to us and they have normally made up their minds and it is really at that point trying to figure out the right service package, fitting it within their budgets and making sure everybody’s expectations are aligned.

So it is really normally a couple of weeks of, do the assessment, build a proposal, present the proposal. If we need to go back and forth with it all, fine. But it is usually less than four weeks.

Trent:

Okay, in our pre interview we talked a little bit about chapters eight and nine in your Marketing Performance Blueprint which, if I remember correctly or I understood you correctly, was kind of created as the by product of all of that churn that you guys experienced in the first year. In other words working with clients that maybe you shouldn’t have been working with because they didn’t have the success criteria in place that your Marketing Score helps you to identify.

So do you want to talk a little bit about the importance of the marketing assessment and developing a marketing score? We’ll stick with the assessment first and then we’ll talk about the score card after that.

Paul:

Yeah, the book is broken into three sections. There is talent, tech and then strategy. So the strategy section is chapters eight, nine and ten. Chapter eight is about doing an assessment; chapter nine is about building a score card and then chapter ten is about building the strategy or the game plan.

For us a lot of the processes and the technologies defined within the book are things that have come from our first hand experience and the challenges we have had doing that upfront assessment, like really assessing potential and aligning expectations. Then from there making sure that everyone is on the same page with the performance metrics, the KPIs that they need.

Studies will tell you that a lot of marketers struggle at really capturing the impact of the activities and the budgets. They struggle at quantitatively proving the impact of their efforts. And so there is a big focus on trying to make sure that you have a score card in place that really tracks the KPIs that are the most important. As marketers today there is no lack of access to data, we have data coming from everywhere. But there is a line in the book that say data without analysis is simply *inaudible*. It is like not a data problem, it is turning data into intelligence problem.

And then intelligence into action; so that is really what chapters eight, nine and ten are about. Assess the foundation, the potential, get expectations in order, then build a score card that is based on the metrics most important to the organization, and making sure those connect to the business goals that matter to the C-Suite.

Because marketers, we love to talk about likes, and impressions and website visitors and social reach and all of these things that at the end of the day the C-Suite doesn’t care about.

They just want to know, is it impacting my bottom line, is it making me more profitable, is it increasing the customer lifetime value, decreasing the cost of acquisition. Those are the things that matter to the C-Suite. And so as marketers it is about understanding that and evolving. Then the last chapter is just building the game plan and making sure that everything you do, every action is connected to an outcome and that we don’t just stop at task lists, which again as marketers, we are really good at building list of things to do and then checking them off.

And then feeling satisfied when we created a deliverable; and not necessarily that good at connecting whether or not that deliverable has an impact on the business.

Trent:

So in the case where you as the marketing team for a given organization do not have responsibility for actually closing the deals, how do you provide the C-Suite with the reporting or measurement necessary? Because if for example you are doing a great job of generating leads and their sales team is doing a horrible job at closing the leads; the end result is “nah”. C-Suite is going to look at that and they could very likely blame you.

Paul:

Yeah, this goes back to why the upfront assessment is so critical. Sales / marketing integration is one of the things we go through and assess during that process. And what we’ll want to know is that exact thing. Like if we as an agency or for the marketers, if we are being held accountable for lead / sale conversion rates then you have to have a very clear understanding of how the sales process works.

And you have to have a service level or sales agreement between marketing and sales. That if we deliver you X, then you will do this with it. And that X being the criteria that sales says, “This is a sales qualified lead, it is not just someone who downloaded an ebook, but they viewed the pricing page, they are connected to us on a social account,” whatever your criteria may be, that they satisfy that.

I think that is why you go back and really understand within the organization what your expected to do, and then even if your job isn’t to help convert sales, to gain the full recognition for the value you are creating in the organization. You want to at least have some insight into that, an example would be; I did an article for PR week earlier this month that talked about how PR pros are basically leaving their value on the table.

They are not taking full credit for what they do, an example is say that the PR person runs the speaking strategy for an executive at a company and that speaking strategy lands that executive five speaking gigs in the first half of 2015; and of those five speaking gigs it ends up generating ten new business opportunities that creates a million dollars in new business throughout the year.

Now if the PR people stop at, “Hey we landed them five gigs, we did our job.” And they don’t have any insight beyond that, they are not taking full credit for the value they have created in the organization. The same goes for, staying on the PR track, you get a placement in Inc magazine, a lot of PR people stop with, “We got a placement, here’s how many people read Inc magazine, that is it, end of story.”

But if you have access to Google Analytics or if you can get to those reports, you can know, “Wow that article actually sent 100 people to our site, to our client’s site, or our site.” Of those 100 people fifteen actually ended up downloading an ebook, five of those people actually signed up for a webinar and three of those people became clients.

So again the PR person is leaving all this value on the table, because they don’t have insight into the performance of what they’ve done.

Trent:

Yep, that makes a lot of sense but how do you do that on a; because I know Hubspot pretty well as you obviously do, we are both Hubspot partners and Hubspot is not providing the full; well I guess it is depending upon how things are paid for and depending on how people are keeping track of the information on once a deal is close. But what I am curious about is, from the perspective of creating a scalable reporting system for the C-Suite in particular, how do you go about doing that?

Paul:

You’ve got to have the analytics of it properly and you have to have the right attribution models, it is actually not that challenging, but the biggest part is the internal hurdles of who owns the analytics. A lot of times, if like you are the outside agency and you don’t have any insight into the analytics, they are not going to readily give access to one of the seven agencies they are working with.

That can be challenging but the technology is there to make it rather simple; in Hubspot you can drill into the sources report and get down into the specific sites that generated the conversions if it is connected to SalesForce. And then with Google Analytics it is simply a matter of setting up event tracking using your UTM tags properly, or setting up your goal conversions.

It is really just having someone, either internally or externally that knows how to properly set up the analytics so then you can get at the reports you need. The technology is there and a lot of the organizations out there probably already have everything they need to do it; it just maybe isn’t set up properly.

Trent:

And when you are talking to a client about wanting to get access do you get pushed back at all on that?

Paul:

We don’t ever but we are usually talking to people who are coming to us to help them solve for this; so they understand why if we are going to be tied to specific performance metrics, we have got to see what is going on in the backend; we got to get access to reports.

I would say the only push back may be that you have to sign a NDA first. Fine, but in terms of push back like, “No you guys don’t need access to it.” Then we would just say, “Alright we are not the right agency for you because we absolutely need access to it and if you don’t think we do then you are coming in with the wrong perception about what our value is going to be.

Trent:

So when you are talking to a new client, setting proper expectations is incredibly important, because people need to understand that this is not; as we talked about it before, a microwave solution. It is more of a crock pot solution, it takes time to develop a strategy, it takes time to develop premium content and building the automation and work flows and so forth.

And all of that has to happen even before you publish your very first blog post, so is there anything that over the years you have learned in terms of helping clients to set expectations that work better, that they remember after the fact? Because people often times have short memories.

Paul:

For us it is just getting them to commit to what exactly their goals are and then reverse engineering it. So to see if it is realistic based on what they are currently achieving; let’s go back to an example of if they are getting a hundred leads per month on average into their sales funnel and of those leads, let’s say 10% of them turn into an opportunity, well if they come and say, “We want to get 500 leads a month and we are not going to spend any money on paid media; it is all going to be owned and earned media.”

Then we are going to look at them and say, “Well where is that going to come from, where are these leads going to come from? If we don’t have enough website traffic, you don’t have a big subscriber base, you don’t have an unnurtured contact database, like where do you think that value is going to come from because to get to the number of leads you want or the number of opportunities you want we have to increase the leads tenfold. Where is it coming from?”

It is boiling it down to numbers a lot of times and then just being realistic with them about, “If you want to take a leap forward you can’t continue to use the conservative budget or approach you have always used. Something has to change.”

Trent:

How many of the clients that you deal with try and succeed with inbound marketing on their own before they engage with you?

Paul:

That is a good question; I would say it is so different depending on the type of organization.

Trent:

Alright, let me rephrase the question, because I want to dig into some details. Can you think of a specific organization; and you don’t have to name them, that tried to succeed on their own before they decided to work with you?

Paul:

In the early days; a lot of our clients I would say yeah we probably saw more people trying it themselves but back then you could do like blogging and SEO and social and it could make an impact in the pretty short term. But that was four years ago, five years ago. The landscape has gotten a lot more competitive. And so just jumping into inbound, signing up with Hubspot, Marketto, whatever the solution may be, and doing some content creation, putting out a few ebooks, it just doesn’t have the same impact it did before.

And I think Mark Schaefer wrote a blog post called content shock, it is probably like six to eight months ago now.

And that was the basic premise Mark had, was like all of this content is great but now that we are all doing it at some point, do you realize diminishing returns for our efforts?

We still see it where people will buy into the ideas of inbound marketing, but more often than not they realize they either need to hire the internal team to really get value out of it or they need to find an outside partner to help them do it right from the beginning because it is a far more competitive landscape.

Trent:

And so what are some of the things that you see folks doing wrong?

Paul:

Crappy content [laughing].

Trent:

Crappy is ambiguous, so be specific about what you mean by crappy.

Paul:

They try and take shortcuts. I’ve had issues ever since the content market places became in vogue, and not to diminish the value of content curation but the reality is those things are done as shortcuts; you are going to get what you put into it and so people thought they could pay for a service that for a $1000 a month would pump out 40 articles. Then you realize that in fact that service is probably just scraping content and changing the headline name.

Then you get penalized and you don’t even know why you are getting penalised and so I think the people who have done it wrong have tried to take shortcuts. Just like the SEO industry, 2006 – 2010 or even later than that range, when people thought they could just hire an SEO firm that would build a bunch of links and then all of a sudden life is good and you are showing up one or two on Google.

Everybody at the time knew that you were cheating the system, you are taking a shortcut. But there wasn’t a penalty so people did it. And I think that is what happened with content and that’s to a degree what happened with social.

It is just like, “Let’s build enough followers and success will come. Let’s build a bunch of likes on Facebook and people will flock to our website.”

Well everything changes over time and our feeling has always been, if it feels like a shortcut it is and shortcuts don’t work in this business, it is long term. There is processes that work and you have to be committed to long term success.

The people that are going to fail are the ones who think they can take the shortcuts.

Trent:

When it comes to developing a strategy for; to answer this question, “What should we write about?” That is a common question amongst companies who are new to the idea of inbound marketing and people like Marcus Sheridan talked about, if they ask, we answer. I have interviewed some people on the show that have had a lot of success with that regard. Or with that approach rather.

Are there approaches other than that that you find work very, very well in specific industries or what is the approach you take?

Paul:

The simplest solution is what everybody preaches it is what content marketing Marcus Sheridan, Hubspot to a degree, everybody is preaching the same stuff, you have to write about what your audiences actually care about. It could be pain points, it could be questions they have, it could be the kind of information they are looking to to help them make buy-in decisions.

You just have to really understand your different personas; you have to write about things that are highly relevant to them and hopefully that is different than what they are going to get elsewhere.

Content creation isn’t that hard if you have good writers, it is the content strategy that is the really hard thing and it is harder to come by a great content strategist that can really understand personas and then not only get them into the top of your funnel, like create blog posts and ebooks and webinars and podcasts that draw people to the site but then think through the content strategy. “Now how am I going to move those people into our funnel and through the funnel?”

“How am I actually going to turn them into lead opportunities? How am I going to turn them into customers; how to keep them as customers?” Content strategy or inbound strategy, it has to really follow through the whole customer journey.

And that to me is the challenging part.

Trent:

And so what are some of the things; I want to get more specific again. Let’s say a company that sell whatever. They are doing a good job of attracting people to the top of their funnel; and I actually had a CMO write me about this just the other day. He said, “We get lots and lots of leads into the top of the funnel but we are having a difficult time (this was a big company by the way) moving them through the sales funnel and getting won opportunities out of the end of that, like closing deals, getting new clients.” And I wrote him back with some questions and I haven’t heard yet unfortunately.

But some of the things that I was asking was, “What types of content do you make available to your (and they have a very large sales team) that is not just brochures and sales collateral and so forth?” But from a strategy perspective, what advice would you give to people who maybe have a similar problem; so lots of leads coming in at the top of the funnel but they are not getting out the bottom?

Is there some best practices they should be following?

Paul:

It is going to be so different by industry and by company, because I think about it in terms of the customer journey. Like let’s say that lead is coming in through an ebook download, they are creating really cool content that is getting people to download assets. Normally when you are just downloading an ebook you are probably pretty early in your customer journey; like they awareness education phase, you are not really at the attempt to buy phase.

In the perfect world you have, like let’s say you’re a SaaS product and you offer a demo or a free trial, well that’s probably what you are trying to get them to because you know your conversion rate skyrockets once you get them to actually test drive the product. So if your lead stage is they download an ebook or attend an event then how are you going to move them to the demo free trial phase?

And that could be a content problem, it could be a pricing problem, it could be a product limitation. So that is why I say it is going to be so different, the reason people wouldn’t be moving to the next stage might not be a marketing or a content problem at all. It may be something completely different.

But if you have solved for the different phases of the customer journey and you really know your personas and you are creating content very specific to those personas, then in theory you should be able to move them into the next phase unless it is something that as a marketer is outside of your control.

Trent:

Well, let’s do this, let’s talk about your organization, if we may. So you have obviously been generating lots of leads from your site for a long period of time, as have I. Did you, when you first started, was it any different than it is now in terms of your ability to take those top of funnel leads and get them through the middle and down to the bottom of the funnel?

And if it is different now, what did you change?

Paul:

For us we introduced Marketing Score into the equation. That was the game changer, because that generates a significant amount of leads that we can qualify and run marketing automation work flows to. So we created a different vehicle but I guess the principles apply. We had people coming into the funnel that may complete an online form, may download an ebook, attend a webinar or whatever it is. But then if they weren’t ready to buy our services there was no in between.

So Marketing Score became a tool for us to use to help people. The vast majority of people who used marketing score, have never been, probably will never be customers of PR20/20. But it gave us that ability to further move people along by creating value for them.

I want to go back to Jay Baer’s utility book, it is a utility, it is something that is meant to help them move their marketing forward, improve their performance; if there is mutual value and they need an agency, and they need an agency like ours, great, but if not it is a way for us to continue to gain insight into their organization and hopefully offer some recommendations that help them. And we have lead scoring that goes on based on Marketing

Score, and if someone hits a specific threshold then we will proactively communicate with them.

So that was our way of doing it, we created a new step within our process.

Trent:

So if right now does it look like this, they come to your site because they find your content some place, they read a blog post, they download one of your top of funnel ebooks, they get some follow-up emails, those follow-up emails contain links to Marketing Score. They do or they don’t complete Marketing Score. If they do complete marketing score there is some additional emails and you proactively reach out to them.

Is that more or less what it looks like?

Paul:

Yeah, and we also diversify offerings and revenue. It is kind of a marketing problem if you think about product, price, place, promotion. We are solving for these but some people we realise may not be able to afford our services but they may want to do online education. They may be willing to pay $500 to take a webinar series but they don’t have $10,000 a month for services.

So we also introduced different things, different ways for people to engage with the company that didn’t necessarily require them committing to an ongoing program with us. That was another way to nurture people along, was to introduce new things that they can do.

Trent:

Interesting, okay; so we are going to wrap up here in just a minute. What haven’t I asked you around this rather broad; the interview kind of went off into all sorts of wild directions different than I expected and I hope the listeners feel that we did a decent job. I am not sure that I did a good job as an interview host this time or not [laughing] but what haven’t I asked you that you think would make this interview richer?

Paul:

I think the question that I get all the time, especially after speaking gigs, is how do we get started? Like there is so much to do, there are so many different marketing tools out there. There are so many different channels and strategies we can follow. “How do we get started?”

And I always say it goes back to the foundational elements. You have to have the right people. And whether that is a point person internally; internal champions if you’re bigger enterprise, you have got to have that point person that is willing to look at, “How do we evolve as an organization from a marketing standpoint?”

If you are a small to midsize business it is probably the CMO or director/VP of marketing someone who understands the dynamics of the new age of marketing we have entered. And can guide you, it may also include an outside agency if you need to fill specific gaps. But having the right people is so critical and then today, more than ever, the right tech is critical to success.

So the right talent and the right tech, otherwise the strategy becomes irrelevant because without the right people and the right tech you are not going to build the right strategies. And you’ll certainly not achieve performance potential.

Trent:

Alright Paul, thank you very much for making some time to come back on and talk with us again, it has been a pleasure to have you on.

Paul:

Thanks for having me.

Trent:

Alright to get to the shownotes for this episode go to BrightIdeas.co/168 and if you like this episode, or heck, even if you loved this episode, please head over to BrightIdeas.co/love where there is a tweet awaiting the click of your mouse to help us to spread the word.

So that is it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. If you are looking for help with inbound marketing please feel free to visit us at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/resources where there is a complete library of all of our complimentary ebooks and guides and webinars and so forth to help you increase your knowledge.

And of course if you would like to reach out and ask us questions, there is ways for you to do that as well. The easiest of course is to pick up the phone, 208-391-2057. Look forward to having you back for another episode soon,

I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, take care and have a good day. Bye-bye.

About Paul Roetzer

Paul started PR 20/20 in November 2005 after seven years at a traditional PR and marketing firm. He is the author of The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley, 2012) and The Marketing Performance Blueprint (Wiley, 2014); creator of Marketing Score and Marketing Agency Insider; and a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.