In this episode I interview Cathy Moran, a bankruptcy attorney. Cathy shares how Content Marketing has helped her attract clients and help them better understand the bankruptcy process before they even speak with her. Her strategy generates more leads who are ready to start working with her without first having to undergo a long consultation.
This speaks to the core of my philosophy on content: make it relevant to your client and help nurture your leads throughout the sales process.This episode definitely helps to validate how and why content marketing is such a powerful tool for your business. Listen now and you’ll hear Cathy and I talk about:
(02:35) Introductions
(04:25) Why is Content Marketing for lawyers in bankruptcy so important?
(07:35) Why is giving information away for free so effective?
(10:05) When did you get started with Content Marketing?
(11:15) How did Content Marketing affect the types of clients you attracted?
(12:35) How should an attorney decide what to write about?
(16:35) How has content helped you to get more referrals?
(20:35) How should an attorney get started with Content Marketing?
(25:05) How can you make a blog post interesting?
(30:35) How should you make an article interesting?
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.
Cathy Moran opened her own law firm the day after she was admitted to the California bar. She’s practiced bankruptcy law in the Silicon Valley of California for 32 years, representing debtors, creditors, and trustees. She is certified as a specialist in Bankruptcy Law by the Board of Legal Specialization, State Bar of California and has particular interest in the intersection of bankruptcy law and the fields of family law and tax.
Cathy launched Bankruptcy in Brief, found at bankruptcyinbrief.com in 1998, when the web was new. Currently she writes for consumers on bankruptcy issues at bankruptcysoapbox.com and on issues for lawyers new to consumer bankruptcy law at bankruptcymastery.com.
Her latest web project is ConsumerLedger.com, a personal finance site where she shares what she’s learned about law, money, and business with the general public. Cathy serves as the Northern California chair of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. She is a frequent speaker at lawyer gatherings on bankruptcy, marketing and content creation. She makes her home on the San Francisco Peninsula, close by her alma mater Stanford University.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Cathy.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-04-07 06:00:202020-09-14 06:42:29How to Leverage Content to Build a Successful Law Practice with Cathy Moran
Having trouble conveying your message to customers? Not closing sales as efficiently as you would like? You might have to adjust your buyer persona.
If you haven’t created a buyer persona, you are wasting your time and money. In this episode, I dive into some quick tips on how to create a relevant persona and how to use that to create relevant content – all of which leads to a successful content marketing strategy. Take a quick listen and you’ll learn:
Why Buyer Personas Are So Important
The Consequences of Not Identifying Your Ideal Customer
What the Right Customer Can Do For Your Business
Audience Jacking and How to Find Your Ideal Customer
Tools For Identifying Potential Leads
For more episodes from myself and other accomplished business professionals, Subscribe now and don’t miss out on future shows.
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.
Welcome back to episode number 115 of the BrightIdeas podcast.
I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase your profits; well, my friends you are in the right place.
In today’s episode I’m going to talk about 3 reasons why you must create a buyer persona template.
Why might you want to listen to this?
If you are having some difficulty being interesting enough and getting enough traction with your marketing, maybe you’ve missed out on this.
The other reason I think you should listen to this episode is you’re going to discover the number one mistake that most new marketers make in this area and I’m going to teach you how to do it properly.
So before we get in to that, I have two very quick announcements.
If this is your very first time listening to the BrightIdeas podcast and your listening to a mobile device, please right now text the word podcast to the number 96000 and you’ll see some of my cool marketing automation trickery – which is very easy to reproduce – plus you’re get an opportunity to opt-in and make sure that you receive notifications of all future episodes that come out.
Announcement number 2 is if you’re looking for proven blueprint for using digital marketing, I wrote a book and it’s called the Digital Marketing Handbook and you can download a free chapter at brightideas.co/book.
With that said lets transition over and go ahead and teach you about why you need to create a buyer persona.
Welcome back to another video on my series on content marketing. In this video – as the headline might clue you in – we’re going to talk about buyer personas.
So a buyer persona is something that you don’t want to skip. This is really important because if you don’t take the time to define exactly who you’re writing for and who you want to attract to your blog – and ultimately they will become… the goal of course, to have them become customers of your company – you’re going to fail in a couple of really important areas.
Number 1 is relevancy. You’re content obviously is not going to be as relevant as it is otherwise could, and that can have a cascade effect on two other really important things. If your content is not super relevant, your audience is not going to be very engaged. If they’re not very engaged, they’re not going to do a lot of sharing in social networks – and don’t underestimate the power of social networks.
When you produce copies of content – be the video like this one, or a podcast, or a written piece of content – if you really nailed relevancy, a lot of sharing can take place and it can actually have a very viral effect.
So how do you go ahead and get started with creating a buyer persona? Starts with research. If you have the customers right now, make sure that you pick up the phone and talk to them, because if they are your ideal customer, and you want you want more of those people, in order to track more you need to understand precisely who they are – and at the end of this video I’m going to give you a link to some additional resources that you can get some templates for this stuff.
Now, if you don’t have a lot of customers, a little term that I invented is called Audience Jacking. Basically all that is this: you’re going to go to your competitor’s blog and you’re going to look at who’s commenting on those blogs – and typically when people comment, under their names is a hyperlink to their own website.
When you get back to their website, you’re going to learn a lot more about those people. One other thing that you’re going to be able to do is find their social profiles. When you figure out who they are, go to their Facebook page and under their picture there’s going to be a more button and underneath that more button is you can see what they like, so that’s going to give an idea of some of the interest of that individual.
The other thing you should do is go to their twitter profile and look at their twitter stream, what site’s content are they retweeting, who are they following. This is going to tell you a lot about the type of things that are of interest to this person (who is of course of interest to you), same with LinkedIn. Look at their LinkedIn profiles, there is tons of data there for you to mine.
How do you find your competitors or how do you learned about your competitors?
There is a free resource called Quantcast. If you type in any sites URL into Quantcast, you’ll get a lot of demographic information about that site.
How do you find what (on at any given website) the audience is most interested in? Go type their URL into a Quicksprout – so go to quicksprout.com. Neil Patel has a tool there that does website analysis. You punch in the URL, let it crunch its numbers, click on the top tab of the middle called the social media tab, and then give it a minute to crunch the numbers and then scroll down and you’re going to see a list of all of the most shared pieces of content on that site – which also by the way, will give your ideas of the things that you should be writing about.
I promised some additional resources. If you watching this on YouTube or some other place, just go to brightideas.co/persona. That will take you directly to the blog post that contains this video plus a bunch of other resources that we created for you.
One of those resources that we didn’t create but will be downloadable is a guide. It’s actually a template for creating buyer personas and it was produced by Hubspot. It’s a wonderful guide. I didn’t need see the need to recreate it plus there will be some additional resources for you.
Now if you are watching this video and this is the first time that you’ve ever been exposed to BrightIdeas, I have something else for you that I want to give to you. That’s my conversion tactics four-part video trainings series, it’s absolutely free! All you have to do is go to brightideas.co, enter your name and email address and you will be given instant access.
Thanks very much for tuning in. I hope to see you in another episode so take care.
Additional Resources
How Content Marketing Has Forever Changed How To Attract Clients and How You Can Take Advantage of This Shift
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/3-reasons.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-04-04 06:00:532020-09-14 06:29:253 Reasons You Must Create a Buyer Persona
This episode touches on some key elements of starting a content marketing strategy and why it’s important to take the time to set up your strategy before starting your content marketing. I’ve built Bright Ideas on content marketing, and I believe you can have success with content marketing as well – assuming you have the right strategy. Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
Why Content Marketing is Becoming so Important
Your Sales Funnel and How Content Helps
Finding Influencers
Defining Your Target Market
Supporting a Niche or Specialized Service
For more episodes from myself and other accomplished business professionals, subscribe now and don’t miss out on future shows.
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.
Welcome back to episode number 114 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this the podcast where we feature interviews with the entrepreneurs behind some of today’s fastest growing companies, if you’re looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you start a new business or to grow an existing one, you are in the right place.
Now, I just said that this is the podcast where we do interviews and guess what; I’m not going to do an interview in this particular episode. That’s right! I’m branching out and I’m going to start doing some monologue podcasts. The reason for that is that I want to increase a frequency of the episodes that I do in the ITunes store and I want to be able to make myself available to help you guys in small bite size chunks so these episodes that I do as monologues are going to be lot shorter and they’re going to be direct and straight to the point, so with that said lets jump into what we are going to talk about in this one. On this episode we’re going to talk about beginner’s guide to creating an effective content marketing strategy. Now I’m actually kind of cheating in this first episode in that, I already recorded the bulk of this episode as a video and I have decided to repurpose that particular video because there’s nothing on the video that you actually need to see to get the point of what I am explaining. So why do you want to listen to this episode?
If you don’t have a content marketing strategy in place, I can promise — boy oh boy I’m speaking from personal experience — success will take forever if you get it at all! In this episode you were going to learn from some of the many, and I want to emphasize, many mistakes that I made very early in my content marketing career. when I really didn’t have a clue of what I was doing, and as a result of all those make mistakes, I’ve developed a proven plan that I use and that many of the people I’ve interviewed in the past have used — that’s what I learn it from, so really if content marketing is your thing, and boy oh boy it really should be cause it is the way to get business in this day and age, you really going to dig this episode. So that’s it lets jump right into it.
Everybody this is Trent here from BrightIdeas and in this video, I want to share with you something that I go through with client after client after client at the beginning of our engagements, and that is how to get started with a successful inbound marketing campaign. So before we dive into the tactics, I want to talk a little bit about the concept. So the concept is you need to create a “funnel”, for a lack of a better term, of content that’s going to help people to discover you and then go all the way through to becoming a customer. The top of the funnel is where you are probably going to be, or you should be, creating the most content and this is in the area where a lot of people who are new to content marketing make big mistakes.
They start talking about their stuff, their products, and their services. The problem with that is that early on in the buying process people don’t care about you, they care about themselves, and the problems that they are trying to solve. In the order to be successful to attracting interest into the top of your funnel you need to not interrupt people from what their interested in, you need to become what they are interested in and you need to then create content which helps them to solve the problems that they have. We are going to talk about the specific of how to do that in a minute. In the middle of your funnel, this is where you want to start dealing with what I call “providing answers to pre sales questions”.
As you can imagined if you a sales force a lot of times before people buy something, they are asking “what about this? What about that? What about the other thing? How to do this? How to do that?” In the middle of your funnel you want to create content that addresses those issues, because if you do, you will actually move people a lot further along in the buying process and therefore make closing a sale a whole lot easier, without having any of the one-on-one interaction that you would have to have if you didn’t have this content in the middle of your funnel. And then at the bottom of your funnel that is where you tell him to buy, or is they said in Jerry Maguire that’s where you say, “Show Me The Money!!”
Those are pieces of content which specifically instruct people to go here, do this, buy this, buy that, click here to buy, put it in your cart… content which helps people to do that, it’s going to be the smallest the money your content, but it is going to be the content that brings the money in. Now, if you sell information products and software, this type of content can actually close the sale for you. If you sell something that requires someone to interact with you because it’s a consulting sale for example, this type of content is not necessarily going to close the sale, but it might close the appointment where you then get to have the sales conversation as we often do in our own business in our consulting division. With that concept said, let’s dive into –before I do that by the way, all of these stuff is explained in a lot more detail on a book that I wrote of the digital marketing handbook and you can get that brightideas.co/book.
Alright, one of the things, the most important thing for you to do to make all of the funnel stuff happen is that you need to start up with researching and the defining a target market. Very, very often when I am in discussions with consulting clients and I say to them, “who is your target market?” and they say “well small business”, “I sell marketing services for example, and I want to sell to small business.” The problem with that is that it’s far too broad and it’s not specialized enough. So you really do need to pick a niche and specialize and the way you do that if you have customers you need to get on the phone with your customers and you need to ask them questions to gain a really deep understanding of why exactly did they choose you? How they find you? What they like most about working with you? What are areas that you could improve?
You really want to get inside the head of your customer and figure out, especially when they were in this top of the funnel phase, kind of what were they interested in? What problem were they trying to solve? Now if you don’t have any customers yet, you can still do this and it is a crafty way to do it, use something like LinkedIn for example, great for connecting with other business people, and say “listen I am doing a survey because I want to understand how the fastest growing companies are using digital marketing to achieve their results. If you help me by answering questions, we will be only in the phone for about 10 minutes, I will make sure that you will get a free advance copy of the survey so that you can gain and understanding of what the fast growing companies are doing different than the companies that are not growing so fast.” Trust me when I say, people will be fairly willing to help you because they are very interested in seeing the results of the survey.
We are going to use those conversations to gain a much deeper understanding, you want to understand their problems, their needs, their wants and their desires, and you also want to understand the language that they used to describe these things. Imagine that you were sitting at the conference room with the management team, they were doing their strategy session they are talking about their problems, what words are they using? What terminology? What phrases? You really need to understand this stuff, because you’re going to use it later on your blog post titles and also in your free report titles, the headlines on your sales pages and opt-in pages, you really have to make sure that you use their language. The other thing that you going to gain deep understanding of, is their media consumption profile. What is that? It is all the sites that they go to a regular basis, the magazines that they read on a regular basis.
The discussion groups, the LinkedIn groups, the Facebook groups, and where did they hang out online? Who did they follow? Who did they think is in an influencer within their niche? The reason that this is so important for you to know is later on when you start to promote your content, you need to know who these people are so that you could go build relationships with them and a very easy way to build those relationships is when you’re creating your content basically you just suck up to them. For example, let say that there’s a guy named Bob and Bob is really influential in the same niche that you want to get traction in. You are going to write an education blog post covering whatever.
In that post you are going to make sure that you make Bob look really good, then once the post is live on your site, you are going to tweet or email to say, “Hey Bob, I made you to look really good on my blog post.” You’re not going to use exactly those words, but that’s mostly what you need to say. Bob is going to come along and read your post, he is going to think “wow, and he made me look really smart I better tell my followers about this.” The more that you make other people, who are already influencers in your niche, look smart, the faster you will get traffic to your blog and followers. I cover a whole lot more about on how to promote your content in the book that was mentioned earlier. Once you’ve gone through step number 1, step number 2 is you want to find your buyer personas, what is it persona? Well in every sale there are people who are influencers, generally they are tasked with doing the research because their boss asked them, and they have some kind of specialized skill or knowledge that the decision maker doesn’t necessarily have. You get influencers and then you get decision makers. Now when you are creating your content, because you know that the influencers are probably the ones doing the research early on, you need to make sure that you create a lot of content for those influencers, but if you don’t know who they are, if you don’t know the problems that they have the things they are interested in, it’s going to be harder to create relevant content.
Then you need to speak to these people, in maybe a different way than you need to speak to the decision makers and you are going to get it figured out when you’re having those one on one conversations. That is why, I don’t recommend that you use surveys to do these research because the meat, the stuff that you really after is in those live conversations that you want to have on the phone. Step number 3, is to develop a unique selling proposition, which is what USP stands for, and the important word in that sentence is unique. Earlier in this video I talk about the importance of specialization. The reason that specialization is so incredibly important is that you need to be unique. Let us go back and say that I’m trying sell services to the legal profession and I put up my website, “I serve lawyers.” Well it is really hard to be unique if I say “I serve lawyers.”
But within the legal profession there are sub-niches, there are lawyers that focus on DUI, other lawyers focus on estate planning, there are lawyers that focus on injury and there are lawyers who focused on back injury and then there lawyer who focus on other… you’re getting the idea right? There are niches within niches. The more specialized that you become two wonderful things happen: the more unique you become, you have less competition. And because you’re so relevant to the niche you’re going after, you’re so specialized you can charge much higher prices than if you’re a generalist because your buyers perception of value goes up a whole bunch. Make sure that you specialize and make sure that your website conveys that point. Now, you don’t have to specialize in just one niche, but you should start off with just one niche until you get meaningful traction in that niche and chances are, given this you can run a business globally as I do from our home here in Boise, one nice can still have a lot of different customers within it. Second part of step 3 is you’re going to develop content. Two types of content, you need to have, there are lot types of content but in this video there are two types of content, Lead Magnets and Blog Posts.
The lead magnet is the thing that you’re going to offer to people when they come to your site to give you their email address. That is incredibly important because if you don’t ever capture the lead, it is impossible to further nurture those leads. Make sure that you send them the most relevant content. How do you determine what the most relevant content is? You’re going to collect data and I have talked a lot about is in my book, there’s two type of data, internal data and external data. It’s outside the scope of this video but it’s very, very important if you want more info get the book. But, the reason it is so important is that you need to make sure that you send the right stuff to the right people. Because if you send the wrong stuff to the wrong people, relevance goes down, also the thing that goes down is the number of people that open your email cause it won’t be is interesting. Even worse is the number of people that unsubscribe from your list is going to go up. You don’t want to be sending the wrong information to the wrong people. You need to have relevance as high as you can, and so making sure that you understand who your buyers are, understand who your personas are, is going to help you a whole bunch with relevance, but also, you need to collect the data about those people to make it as relevant as possible.
If you don’t have a lead magnet, no one going to give you their email addresses, they don’t ever end up in a file, you can’t collect any data. They are just a random visitor to your website, they may never return again and you don’t want that to happen. Once you have done this, now you can get ready to get going with content marketing, you are ready to start creating content that aligns with the various places in this funnel, you’re ready to create an editorial calendar; you’re ready to create a list of things to blog about. There is a lot of different ways you can create content, there’s a lot of different types of content that you can create, posts, videos like this one, podcast, different types of post, and all of that stuff I cover in detail in my book the digital marketing handbook. It’s what I used to build my own business and I have a tribe now over 10,000 people, 10,000 plus visitors a month at the time I’m recording this video in December of 2013. Maybe you are watching this a year later in the numbers, more likely is gone up a whole bunch.
If you want that info in detail, go ahead and grab a copy of my book. Now if you are not watching this on my website, if you’re watching it on YouTube or some other place and you want more free information, come over to brightideas.co, become a subscriber. When you do, you going to get access to my four part video series on how to maximize conversions, and it is totally free.
All you have to do is give me your name and your email. I practice what I preach, I have got a lead magnet and I want to capture leads, I want the segment and want to nurture, but most of all I want to help you become more successful. So, thank you for tuning in this video. I’ve got a lots of other videos here on my YouTube channel, make sure you become a subscriber and if you really like this video, do me a quick favor, share it on twitter, LinkedIn, your Facebook or Google+, okay? Share it on all of them.
Thank you so much will see you on another video. Take care.
Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive.
Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback was very encouraging.
In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results that I achieved. If you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business.
Sound good? Here we go!
Key Activities in the Week of March 24, 2014
During the week of March 24th, I worked on the following things:
I asked our writing team to write 5 blog posts
Did a Content Marketing Blueprint discovery call with our new client
Did a scoping call with three prospective clients (suspects)
Wrote a proposal for a qualified prospect
Wrote a white paper for the middle of our funnel (MOFU)
Asked my designer to create a cover page for the white paper
Asked my designer to create a Call-to-Action image for the white paper
Asked my designer to create some podcast cover art
Had one of our virtual assistants create a list of of suspect companies for outreach
Tested our top of funnel (TOFU) automated workflows
Created MOFU automated workflows
Connected Hubspot to Infusionsoft using Zapier
Created several automated campaigns for managing new prospects
Published several more middle of funnel posts to the blog
Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I will not be the one writing the posts for Groove.
Instead, I am treating Groove’s blog exactly like I’ll be treating all of Groove’s client’s blogs. This means that the writers that will be writing our own content will be the exact same team of writers that are producing content for our clients.
There are two reasons I’m doing this:
I believe in drinking my own kool-aid (what’s good for me is good for my clients)
Working “in” the business is not how a CEO should spend their time
I’m not saying that I will ‘never’ write a post for Groove, but I am saying that 90% or more of them will be written by people other than me.
One of the most common objections I hear from people when it comes to not writing their own content is that they fear that no one else can write as good as they can.
Really?
Do you think Hubspot’s blog publishes articles from the company’s founders? Hardly.
Instead, Hubspot publishes content from a team of staff writers and other Hubspot partners. Given that Hubspot’s blog is one of the most popular blogs on the web (and the company has gone from $20M to $100M in the last 2.5 years), I think that their success is ample evidence that working with writers works just fine…SO LONG as you give them enough guidance.
What is enough guidance, you ask? Well, for us, it looks like this:
We provide them with a detailed post outline that includes the main key points that we want them to write about
We provide them with instructions detailed enough to ensure that the first draft is 90% of what we’ll need to publish to our client’s site
Did a Content Marketing Blueprint Discovery Call with Our New Client
I mentioned last week that we signed our first client. This week, I spent an hour on the phone with them to help them get started with the detailed questionnaire that we use to create their Content Marketing Blueprint.
The Blueprint plays an absolutely critical role in the content marketing process, and the feedback from our client was terrific.
Prior to the call, I warned them that the questions that I was going to ask them were not going to be easy to answer, and that they should expect to involve several members of their team.
At the 40 minute mark of the call, they told me that, while difficult, they were absolutely loving how our questionnaire was really forcing them to think about who their customer really is and what problems they needed to address.
Scoping Calls With Prospective Clients
At the end of the day, everything that I’m doing from a marketing perspective has a single goal: give me the opportunity to do discovery calls with qualified leads.
When you end up talking to someone who already knows they need what you do, and they have already been exposed to your (high quality) content, the chances of your converting these prospects into clients is actually quite high – assuming they can afford what you do, and have the authority to say yes.
Of the 19 leads we generated from Groove’s site, 3 turned out to be qualified enough for a scoping call.
What is a scoping call? We talk to them to find out if there is a need for what we do, and to see if they would be qualified (budget, authority, need, timeline) to work with us.
Wrote a White Paper for the Middle of Funnel (MOFU)
When we created our own Content Marketing Blueprint, one of the things that was designed was our MOFU offer. Generally, a MOFU offer is a white paper or webinar that provides more detailed information about your specific service, what its like to work with you, etc…
The middle of the funnel (MOFU) is shown as the Consideration Stage. This is where prospects begin to become interested in learning about the specifics of how your company could help them.
Think of this white paper as a very detailed brochure that is only sent to prospects who’ve requested it. This is one of the ways we filter our qualified leads from those who are just looking for free information.
Generally speaking, this white paper is about 2,000 words long and rich with images. The goal of the white paper is to convert a marketing qualified prospect (that’s a term we use to describe a MOFU lead) into a sales qualified prospect. Once they become sales qualified, it’s time to talk to them one to one; which for us, is the scoping call.
Created MOFU Automated Workflows
The workflows for the middle of the funnel are much the same as the ones for the top of the funnel that I created last week. Each workflow is triggered when someone downloads a report, and then a sequence of actions and emails are triggered. The goal is to get the marketing qualified lead to continue on down the funnel to become sales qualified.
Created a Target 100 List of Suspects
While I absolutely love content marketing, I’m the first to admit that achieving success from content marketing alone takes time. To help speed things up, I recommend you combine your content marketing with very targeted outreach.
The importance of targeting a profitable market cannot be understated
To make this happen, I instructed one of our virtual assistant’s (VAs) to build us a spreadsheet containing 100 companies that met the criteria for revenue and industry. This first list contains one industry and companies doing $10M to $25M a year in sales.
With this list in place, the same VA will now be doing cold emails to this list in a very specific way (I describe this in detail in my course, The Best Buyer Formula). We’ll also be making extensive use of our TOFU content to support these emails.
Next week, I’ll be having her build several more industry specific lists and repeating the process so we can begin to collect data on the responsiveness of various niches that we believe are a fit for our services.
Connecting Hubspot to Infusionsoft
When I announced that I’ve chosen Hubspot as the software for Groove, several long-time readers wrote to me to ask why I was “switching from Infusionsoft to Hubspot”?
Given that I never said anything about my switching from Infusionsoft to Hubspot, I was rather surprised at the number of questions I got.
So, with that in mind, let me be clear: I have added Hubspot and still use Infusionsoft.
The reason for using both is simple; aside from email marketing, there is almost no overlap between the two apps. Hubspot is awesome for content marketing and I’m using it to help attract prospects. Infusionsoft, while extremely good at the email marketing part, sucks at content marketing because it wasn’t built for it. In fact, there are zero features for content marketing.
Where Infusionsoft shines is that, in addition to killer email marketing, it also gives me a CRM and eCommerce engine, and I need both of them.
Think of it this way: I use Hubspot to help me to create epic inbound marketing campaigns to attract traffic and leads. I also use it to help me nurture those leads from being just ‘information qualified’ to ‘sales qualified’. Once they are sales qualified, they are copied over to Infusionsoft and then we manage the relationship in Infusionsoft from that point forward.
Of the 4 discovery calls that I did two weeks ago, thus far, one has become a client and gone ahead and purchased a Content Marketing Blueprint for $2,000. The remaining 3 have the payment link in their inbox and I am waiting for them to proceed.
Last week, I left a voice mail for each of the three. One never called back, so they are no longer a prospect and are now ‘demoted’ to ‘suspect’ again and will continue to receive an email per week that is educational in nature.
Another called back and said that budget was going to be an issue and so they needed to delay. They will also be getting an educational ‘drip’ email per week.
The third called back and said that they had every intent to proceed; however, as he (the CEO who called me) had not yet received anything in writing from me (like a proposal), he didn’t have anything to share with his management team to build consensus to proceed.
I sent him the proposal on Thursday and hope to get a commitment to proceed this week.
I should point out that I’m not a really big fan of proposals; however, in some situations, they are a required part of the deal.
If you liked this post, and want future updates on our progress with how to launch a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/groove-weekly-update-post-header.jpg281686Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-04-01 13:09:082015-12-07 20:08:40Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for Week of March 24th
Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive.
Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback was very encouraging.
In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results that I achieved.
As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business.
Sound good? Here we go!
Key Activities in the Week of March 17, 2014
During the week of March 17th, I worked on the following things:
Had my designer rebrand our new Top of Funnel (TOFU) lead magnet. This is a report called “25 Website ‘Must Haves’ for Driving Traffic, Leads, and Sales”
Had my designer create a call to action for the bottom of each blog post that is a part of the first inbound campaign
Created the back end automation in Hubspot (emails and the blog posts they link to) so that when a new lead downloads this report, they receive a series of 3 emails to help them move towards the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
Published 3 blog posts that these 3 emails will link to
Did 4 discovery calls with prospective clients
Signed one new client
Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
If you are going to succeed with content marketing, you’d better have a pretty solid game plan. Just banging out blog posts without a strategy in mind isn’t going to get you the results you’re after. Trust me on this one.
The goal of the blueprint is to force you to really think about who your ideal buyer persona is, what their problems are, and how your solutions can help them to solve their problems.
Once you have gone through this process, the next step is to come up with 3 campaigns that can be executed over 90 days. Each campaign covers one topic, has 8 blogs posts, and is published over 30 days.
All 8 blog posts have a call to action that sends visitors to a landing page where the campaigns lead magnet (ebook) can be downloaded.
When the download happens, a lead is captured and then the automated follow up emails start to go out. The goal is to have your new lead move down through your funnel and transition from being an ‘information qualified lead’ to a ‘marketing qualified lead’, and then, ultimately to a ‘sales qualified lead’.
The Lead Magnet for Inbound Campaign #1
The first lead magnet is a free report will serve our first inbound marketing campaign, which will consists of 8 blog posts published at a rate of two per week over a 30 day period.
I will not be writing these posts. Instead, I have created a detailed set of instructions and will be outsourcing this task to contract writers.
Why use contract writers? Simple. As the CEO, my job is to work ‘on’ the business, not ‘in’ it. If I’m to build a company that can one day be sold for over $1,000,000 (like my last one), I cannot be the one to handle ANY of the day to day operations.
The Call to Action for Lead Magnet #1
Within Hubspot, there is something called a Call-To-Action.
Essentially, it’s a way to create a button that will be clicked to take someone to a webpage where a lead can be captured.
Rather than use just a button at the bottom of the post, I’m going to be using Hubspot’s Call-to-Action feature so that I can get analytics on how many times the button is shown and how many times its clicked. As you might guess, I want detailed analytics on what is (and isn’t) working so that I can continually improve conversion rates.
To ensure that the Call-to-Action stands out, I had my designer create a professional looking image for me that I just uploaded into the Hubspot software.
Create The Back End Automation in Hubspot
On of the things I really like about Hubspot is their Inbound Campaign planning tool.
By using this tool, it’s pretty hard to forget anything. Plus, as my campaign is running, I can collect all sorts of data on how my content and offers are converting. Plus, at the end of the campaign, I will be able to see how my campaign did against the goals I set for it, as well as if the campaign achieved a positive ROI or not.
Below is a screenshot of our first campaign. The campaign is not yet live, but notice how detailed this screen is. It’s literally a checklist for everything you need to do to run a successful campaign.
In future posts, I will be sharing the results of this campaign, so be sure and become a subscriber if you want updates sent to you.
Published 3 Blog Posts to Nurture My Leads
The goal of capturing a lead is to convert them to a customer. To help my leads to move along through my funnel, I need to answer questions and concerns long before a sales conversation every takes place.
When we did our blueprint and defined our persona, we also determined what some of these concerns might be. In our case, they were:
How do I know that content marketing will work?
How do I get started?
What results can I expect?
The three follow up emails that a new lead receives address these issues and then point readers to the appropriate ‘middle of funnel’ blog post.
The posts we published to address these concerns are:
At the end of the day, everything that I’m doing from a marketing perspective has a single goal: give me the opportunity to do discovery calls with qualified leads.
When you end up talking to someone who already knows they need what you do, and they have already been exposed to your (high quality) content, the chances of your converting these prospects into clients is actually quite high – assuming they can afford what you do, and have the authority to say yes.
My Results for the Week
Of the 4 discovery calls that I did last week, thus far, one has become a client and gone ahead and purchased a Content Marketing Blueprint for $2,000. The remaining 3 have the payment link in their inbox and I am waiting for them to proceed.
Two of these calls were done on Friday, so it’s quite possible that payments will be received at some point today or tomorrow (if they do, I will update this post).
The Content Marketing Blueprint is the first step of a new client engagement. Once this step has been done, my client has a solid game plan for their first 90 days of content marketing.
If we both liked working together on the Blueprint, the next step is for my team to set up their Hubspot account (we call this ‘building the engine’) so that all the inbound campaign items I showed you in the screenshot above (except the blog posts) is done. If they want us to, we will also create the three premium reports for them for an additional charge.
At the conclusion of step two, the next (final) step is for my clients to put Groove on retainer to create the blog posts for them. We’ll also advise them on how to promote their content on their social media accounts.
If you liked this post, and want future updates on our progress with how to launch a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/groove-weekly-update-post-header.jpg281686Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-24 10:55:142015-12-07 20:08:40Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for Week of March 17th
I’ve talked about the benefits of focusing on a niche, and this podcast really hits home just how important that is.
Chris started Landscape Leadership, a marketing agency specifically for clients that work in “green” industries. This is a prime example of someone who looked for a need in the market and designed his company around it. If you are considering starting a business and haven’t chosen your niche yet, or you’re in business and aren’t focused on a specific niche, I highly recommend listening in on this episode.
In addition to his niche, Chris and I cover how he got started, how he’s blogging, and what he sells first so that his clients keep working with him.
Listen now and you’ll hear Chris and I talk about:
(02:45) Introductions
(04:45) How did you start your marketing agency?
(07:45) How did working with your first client position you to get more?
(09:30) What do you think focusing on just one niche is so important?
(12:30) What are some of the benefits of focusing on a single niche?
(14:30) What does your blogging routine look like?
(18:25) What do you see as the biggest opportunity for your agency?
(19:30) What does your initial sales conversation look like?
(24:15) What service(s) do you try to sell first?
(25:30) How do you on-board a new client?
(28:25) What advice would you give to people just getting started?
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
Leave some feedback:
What should I talk about next? Please let me know on Facebook or in the comments below.
Chris Heiler is the founder and president of Landscape Leadership, an inbound marketing agency that combines website design/development, social media, content marketing, and search marketing into integrated and measurable campaigns for green industry clients ranging from landscape construction and maintenance companies to lawn care operators and garden centers.
Landscape Leadership has clients across the country with all team members working remotely. Heiler lives in Austin, TX.
How Content Marketing Has Changed and How You Can Take Advantage of This Shift
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chris.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-17 06:00:142020-09-14 04:32:10How Chris Heiler is Growing Landscape Leadership into a Successful Inbound Marketing Agency
Welcome back to another video in my series on content marketing. In this video, as the headlines might clue you in, we’ll be talking about Buyer Personas.
Creating a Buyer Persona is something that you don’t want to skip. This is really important because if you don’t take the time to define exactly who you’re writing for, and who you want to attract to your blog, ultimately you’re going to fail in three really important areas.
Number one is relevancy. Without paying attention to your buyer persona, your content is not going to be as relevant as it otherwise could, and that can have a cascade effect on two other really important things:
If your content is not super relevant, your audience is not going to be very engaged
If they’re not very engaged, they’re not going to do a lot sharing on social networks
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social Networks
When you produce copies of content (be that a video like the one above, or a podcast, or a written piece of content), if you really nail relevancy a lot of sharing can take place and it can actually have a very viral effect.
So how do you go ahead and get started with creating a buyer personas?
Research
Start with research. You need to have a good idea of who you’re talking to and what their interests are. There’s a couple of ways you can do that:
4. Talk To Your Existing Customers
If you have customers right now, make sure that you pick up the phone and talk to them.
If they are your ideal customer you want more of those people, and this group is the easiest to contact. In order to track potential clients you need to understand precisely who they are (at the end of this post I’ll give you some materials to work with).
5. Audience Jacking
Now if you don’t have a lot of customers you can use a little term that I invented that’s called audience jacking.
Basically, you’re going to go to your competitors blogs and look at who’s commenting on those blogs. Typically when people comment, their name is a hyperlink to their website and learn a lot more about those people.
6-8. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
One other thing you are going to be able to do is find your audience’s social profiles.
When you figure out who they are, go to their Facebook page, check out their likes, and give yourself an idea of some of the interests of that individual.
The other thing you should do is go to their Twitter profile and look at their Twitter Stream, what site’s content they are retweeting, who they are following, etc. This is going to tell you a lot about the type of things that are of interest to this person, who is of course an interest to you.
It is the same with LinkedIn. Look at their LinkedIn profiles because there is a ton of data there for you to mine.
9. Quantcast
How do you find your competitors or learn about what their traffic is like?
There’s a free resource called Quantcast. If you type in any site URL into Quantcast you will get a lot of demographic information about that site. This is a great way to check basic demographic data and see what kind of traffic is coming in.
10. Quicksprout
Use this tool for any given website to find what the audience is most interested in.
Go to Quicksprout – Neil Patel has a tool there which does website analysis. You punch in the URL, let it crunch its numbers, then scroll down and you’ll see a list of all of the most shared pieces of content on that site – which, by the way, will give you ideas of the things that you should be writing about.
I want to continue to make these short videos for you and put out useful content regularly. So please, tell me what you think – I’d love to hear your feedback!
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/buyer-persona.png429491Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-12 09:00:152014-03-13 09:24:4810 Things You Need to Know About Creating a Buyer Persona Template
If you want to develop a Content Strategy – or improve your current one – this is one interview you’ll definitely want to listen to.
As the president and owner of Aha Media, Ahava works with clients and travels the country to deliver winning strategies to marketers. An established author, Ahava has captivated thousands with her insights. In this interview, I got a wonderful opportunity to get an inside look at the techniques she uses with her clients.
If you’d like to advance your content marketing techniques, this is a can’t miss episode.
Listen now and you’ll hear Ahava and I talk about:
(02:20) Introductions
(04:00) How is digital copy different than offline copy?
(09:20) What type of clients do you work with?
(11:20) How does a company realize that they need to work with you?
(14:00) What is the #1 Lesson in your book?
(14:50) What are your seven steps to success?
(20:20) What does your client-retainer relationship look like?
(26:20) How do you position yourself as a Strategic Adviser?
(30:50) Why are analytics so important?
(34:20) Describe the framework of an initial sales conversation with a client
(38:20) Do you sell an assessment to get your foot in the door?
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.
Ahava is passionate about content and prides herself on tackling the toughest content projects—from healthcare to higher education to hip-hop (seriously). She has more than 15 years of experience in writing, messaging, and marketing, and is a well-recognized content expert. Her first book, The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web was published by Morgan Kaufmann in November 2013.
Ahava is the president and owner of Aha Media Group, LLC, a content strategy and content marketing consultancy founded in October 2005. Prior to beginning Aha Media, she was a communications strategist for a government agency. Ahava has also worked for two major advertising agencies and a commercial production company, and she served as the metro beat reporter for The Jerusalem Post.
Ahava received her M.A. from Georgetown University and her B.A. from Stern College. She lives in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Ahava.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-12 06:00:232020-09-11 07:06:23How to Win With Content on the Web with Ahava Leibtag
This is what I heard from one of my subscribers a few weeks ago – three weeks in and he was so frustrated with the functionality constraints, he decided the lower startup costs weren’t worth the hassle, even after he had migrated most of his business into Ontraport (formally Office AutoPilot). The same day I heard from him, another one of our subscribers brought a very similar complaint to us via Facebook. The complaints were pouring in!
So, I decided to write this comparison.
With the great CRM system, the loads of 3rd party support, and the amazing Campaign Builder, Infusionsoft was an easy choice for us, but not everyone has the same needs. Here we’ll take a look at the different features each software provides. Specifically, we’ll analyze the following components:
Each program has its own unique approach to software set-up. Infusionsoft is consultant-based and detailed, while Ontraport is more self-servicing and intuitive. Here are the prices and expectations for each:
While the initial startup costs can seem daunting to small business owners, Infusionsoft feels that due to the customizable nature of the software, the startup Kickstart training is necessary. The packages follow a structure which includes:
One-on-one consulting and implementation help in the first 30 days
A custom implementation guide to follow for the next 60 days
Analysis of your business’ needs and challenges
Help implementing the features that will make the biggest impact
Data import and dashboard configuration assistance
There are two packages you can choose from once you begin your Kickstart program:
Marketing Blueprint- Ideal for newer businesses looking to create and implement a marketing strategy for their lead generation and nurturing. This program will help create a framework to utilize in the future.
Automate and Scale- Focused more on businesses looking to scale their efforts and make the business processes self-sustaining and automated. This program is designed to help businesses create internal processes to help sustain growth and scale their operations with the business.
The benefits of the Kickstart program go beyond the training and support for the actual software. With the right strategy and self-reflection, business owners can use this support to write personalized goals and campaign strategies, which is a powerful step in lead generation.
As opposed to Infusionsoft, you can order Ontraport online and move through the setup process fairly quickly. There is a much shorter lead-to-customer cycle, which is a nice touch and can be less intimidating.
As you can see, the monthly fees are higher but there is no startup fee. There is a free 2 hour implementation session which connects you with a dedicated “Hero” who is in charge of your account. The session includes:
Immediate Ontraport training with a dedicated Implementation Specialist
Get started building automated processes tailored to your business
Gain a deep understanding of Ontraport’s features and functionality
Get your sales and marketing automated right away
A unique head start in mastering Ontraport that’s tailored to your business
While the stated deliverables are a little overlapping repetitive, the main point is a service professional will contact you and help set up the program while tailoring the session to your business model.
The difference between Ontraport’s Pro and Team options is pretty negligible as far as I can tell, the main difference being the number of program users and email contacts. The number of emails does not change, which is odd considering the extra $300 a month fees.
The length of set-up time is partly due to the Kickstart training regimen provided by the company (which takes place over 30 days), and partly because the software is so dynamic. While it the time period may seem long, remember that you will be building and implementing your software throughout the actual process. You will be in contact with a dedicated consultant and can utilize the program while it is being created.
After the Kickstart, you should be well prepared to operate the software, as well as automate many of the processes to run your business. That being said, this is not a quick fix solution. This is a long term strategy which takes time to develop and understand. For this to work you need to allocate some time for reorganizing your business.
Community
The other training advantage I believe Infusionsoft has is their large user community. There are large forums with people actively searching and posting ideas on how to use the software effectively and other strategies they have seen succeed and fail. This is something Ontraport, being a relatively newer and self-learning software, does not yet possess.
Along with an active community, Infusionsoft also hosts events and seminars for their users to learn more about the program and upcoming changes. These include:
Infusionsoft University– Based at locations across the country, these classes offer hands-on training, Q&A sessions, mastermind groups, and other events.
Mastermind Webinars– Weekly webinars focused on marketing strategies and automation
ICON– Annual seminar for users to learn from business experts and thought leaders
Along with live phone support, Infusionsoft also features 24/7 chat support, which is vital because if you’re a small business owner like myself, you know your business is always a 24/7 effort.
Ontraport
Approx. Set-up Time: 1-4 weeks
This is one of the nice features about Ontraport. There set-up is much simpler. Most of the functions are relatively easy to understand after an initial training. As with Infusionsoft, you have one point of contact during the transition to help you customize your set-up.
The actual time frame depends on your level of experience with marketing software and willingness to learn, but is undoubtedly shorter than the time Infusionsoft takes to master because it is a less involved system.
This process can take longer if you are migrating from other platforms to a centralized system, but if you are unsure or time-restrained, you can hire a concierge to migrate the systems and help with other learning hurdles.
A Small Staff and Window of Support Makes Me a Little Nervous
Ontraport offers live chat and service calls for customers, but support hours are limited to 6AM-9PM PST on weekdays and 9AM-9PM PST weekends.
The personalization the “Heroes” offer is nice, but it is also a weakness, as only 12 support staff members are available. This is restraining for businesses located outside of the West Coast or in other parts of the world.
Non-Threatening Feel
I like the friendly feel of the entire interface. If you watch the videos and visit the page it is clean and non-intimidating. If you’re a small business owner looking to make a big money decision, you’ll value that level of approachability.
Features
Let’s break down the different perks and features included in each software.
I normally suggest ignoring the Essentials package and moving straight to the Deluxe(s) and Complete packages. The usefulness of the sales component is reason enough to pick up the larger packages. If you don’t have an inventory or product, you will have less need for Infusionsoft in the first place.
As you can see, data can be sorted by tagged details applied to each contact. This is information you can gather based on opt-in forms, random surveys, user actions, or during the check out portion of your sales process. This allows you to search for relevant information depending on the needs of your campaign.
Notice the tag section below. We utilize hundredsof tags. No joke. We tag everything from clicking a certain link, to attending a webinar, to watching a certain percentage of a video, and so much more.
These tags allow you to monitor your customer’s behavior throughout their experience with your site and give you the opportunity to make informed decisions on how to respond to their actions.
Identifying Hot Leads Automatically
Infusionsoft also offers a quality lead scoring system which you can automate to update when a contact has completed certain actions or purchased certain items. This can be incredibly useful for sales teams looking to optimize their time as it helps to quickly identify quality leads without doing manual searching and decision-making.
This is the key to automation – a powerful CRM system which integrates with a reliable automation system. The tagging and organizational aspects allows you to make more precise and meaningful automation decisions.
Clean Data and Company Identification
While this may seem trite, the value of these features on Infusionsoft should not be understated. With the amount of data coming in, it is important to capture unique contacts.
Infusionsoft allows you to delete repeat information and keep a concise and accurate customer base. With Ontraport, this can be time-consuming.
Adding One Tab Can Be So Important
Infusionsoft also allows you to categorize companies independently from customer contacts. If you are running a B2B service or even just have elements of B2B work, this feature is critical. This is also missing in Ontraport’s CRM system.
Sales Pipeline
Informative Video On The Various Actions In The Sales Pipeline Feature
The Deluxe Sales and Complete versions of Infusionsoft allow you to make complex and powerful sales pipeline adjustments. Use this tool to structure task assignment for sales teams, assign leads to users, update product lists for possible customers, and more. This is a feature especially important for companies with devoted sales teams and a list of products the sales team is working with.
This feature is just plain not available in Ontraport.
Ontraport
CRM
Ontraport offers a decent quality CRM system that is useful and intuitive. There is the normal functionality and sorting, but it is much more limited in scope than Infusionsoft.
But this does not mean Ontraport is a bad system.
A Peek Into Ontraport’s CRM
It contains all the necessary components, is clean and efficient, and can handle most CRM needs. There is also a tagging and lead scoring system which can be automated and utilized to act on high involvement actions. The tagging and lead scoring isn’t as advanced as Infusionsoft’s, and doesn’t easily tie into the automation feature (read on for more details about the Marketing Automation differences between the two systems).
These are great features, but they fail to keep up with the sales heavy focus of Infusionsoft. This includes the 150 Custom Fields that Ontraport provides compared to the 100 custom fields per record type that Infusionsoft has. That being said, there are aspects of Ontraport that go above and beyond what Infusionsoft does.
Facebook Integration
If you have a Facebook site or advertising and move a prospect through this channel, Ontraport has a great integration system to capture those leads. This comes standard and creates the lead profile upon user entry. Infusionsoft has a great plug-in called GroSocial which is very similar, but there is an additional fee per month.
Membership Sites
Ontraport offers a free and easy membership site plugin for WordPress users. This is especially useful for information marketing because it allows paying subscribers access to certain content depending on membership level. Infusionsoft offers CustomerHub, but it is also an additional plug-in with an additional fee.
Ontraport offers pretty seamless plugins for WordPress users including order forms, landing page creation, and membership sites. Infusionsoft offers the same.
The difference here is the ability to add-on as your business grows.
Ontraport is limited in its capabilities and does not have a strong plug-in marketplace. Infusionsoft allows you to add nearly any business function you need as you grow your business. This allows for a vastly more personal software system throughout the life of your business.
In the Campaign Builder function of Infusionsoft there is a drag-and-drop feature for creating things such as landing pages. There are templates available that can cater to most customers. With a little bit of training, the process is relatively simple and intuitive.
The function does lack in terms of creativity and manipulation. You can completely customize your pages, but it does take a little more time and understanding of the software.
Email Templates
Infusionsoft’s Email Templates
Email templates are one of the nicer aspects of Infusionsoft’s marketing system. The formatting is very simple and extremely clean, but there are additional functions and personalization available.
For instance, you can insert personalized information in an email, include a download link to an online product, or tag a contact based on a specific link they click in your email.
You can easily direct your emails to specific users, and the integrated anti-spam system helps your emails avoid your contact’s spam folder.
Despite this, there is no real split-testing function in Infusionsoft. You can manipulate the emails to send to specific users (as in cloning the email and selecting A-M and N-Z for example) but it is cumbersome.
THE Campaign Builder
Ok, here it is. The best feature of any small company marketing software – the marketing automation component.
In Infusionsoft, it’s called the Campaign Builder.
Best Campaign Planning Software I’ve Seen
It’s just so damn beautiful.
This feature allows you to conceptually create a system of actions to take place throughout different campaigns. It can trigger automated responses depending on where your contact came from and what they are searching for.
Brilliant.
It’s also very simple to use and makes the process of visualizing the customer buying process on your site much easier.
I really can’t get enough of this piece of software. This is the kind of thing that would normally be reserved for large company software programs worth thousands. This is far and away the best automation tool I’ve seen – not just in comparison to Ontraport, but to any small-to-mid-sized software on the market.
Here are some videos on how the system works and how easy it is to create campaigns.
Ontraport
Webpage Builder and PURLs
Ontraport’s webpage builder is more customizable and looks cleaner. This also applies to Ontraport’s web order forms, post cards, and landing pages. They emphasize the personal touch in their product. These Ontraport-created pages can also be hosted on your own site, which makes it easier to have full control over the sales process.
Ontraport also has a great PURL system. If you are unfamiliar, PURLs are sites that customers land on which has personalized features that can say things like “Hey Brian” or “It’s been 3 days since your last visit, here’s what you missed”. You see this on larger sites like Amazon and it really adds a great marketing angle. These are only available through a 3rd party with Infusionsoft.
Ontraport offers a campaign system which is intuitive and in a language that most users can understand. Select a user action, then a condition (like if the customer is a subscriber), and then a follow up action to be taken.
You can really get down to the specifics with this system and it is a breeze to set-up and utilize. This is a very useful tool in the steps towards profitable automation.
While the system works well and is in the same vein as the Campaign Builder, it can’t even hold a torch to the amount of customization you can achieve with Infusionsoft’s system.
This is possibly the most useful integration feature of the marketing automation tool-set. The Split-Testing option allows you to create up to 4 different emails (A/B/C/D) and send them out based on certain parameters or on random assortment.
This can be integral to your marketing efforts as you measure and report the different response rates you are getting from your campaigns, and is a powerful testing function which isn’t as easy in Infusionsoft.
These emails are also sent from your own IP address and have a time zone identifier for your international customers (Infusionsoft was adjusting that last time I checked).
To be fair, Infusionsoft is really the only one of the two with any real E-Commerce functionality. There is seamless and powerful integration between E-Commerce, CRM, and the Campaign Builder.
If you have a sales team or a product listing, Infusionsoft has a clear advantage because Ontraport just doesn’t have a E-Commerce system in place other than 3rd party plugins.
Shopping Cart
A Multi-Item Shopping Cart Comes Standard
As you can see, Infusionsoft has a multiple-item shopping cart, and action buttons for the different stages of the buying process. You can tag people who have purchased items and redirect sales efforts based on those new conditions. This can also be used in collaboration with your Campaign Builder, making a seamless buyer process to monitor.
Affiliate Center
Infusionsoft offers a hosted affiliate center which is much easier to initiate than Ontraport’s self-hosted option. The system is set up and ready for you, so all you have to do is configure it. Ontraport has this feature but you must create your own site through the WordPress plugin, much more time consuming.
3rd Party Plug-Ins
This is one of the defining features of Infusionsoft. There are a fantastic list of developers catering to niches in your business efforts. If you need a new function in your system, you can often simply find someone who provides it.
Despite the additional costs, I’m going to say this is a big plus for Infusionsoft. Ontraport just does not possess the sheer number and functionality of 3rd party developers as Infusionsoft does. You can add so much personalization and utility to your process, whereas Ontraport users are essentially stuck with the options provided.
Ontraport
Postcards and Email
Ontraport allows you to create and send personalized post-cards to customers with at no extra cost (there is a limit on amount sent). This may not be overly important to your business but it is a nice touch which can really add to your customer’s trust in you.
Ontraport also allows a much larger email lists and amounts of emails to send. You can add additional email contacts to your contract with Infusionsoft, but it is an additional fee.
Tracking is made pretty simple with Ontraport’s system. It allows you to see with data and charts what things your customers are doing on your site – which pages they visit, which links they click, and more.
This is especially useful with Ontraport’s email split testing and PURL functions, which can give you fast and easy reporting on your campaign reactions.
While Infusionsoft does offer data analysis tools, you will likely want to create your own analytic reports. They do offer some standard functions but for more detailed reporting you have to create your own formulas. This allows for more customization, but to be honest, it can be difficult to know what you want the data to do and, probably more so, what data is worth looking into.
The analytics reporting feature included in Ontraport is a little more easy to read and conceptualize, especially with the graphs and other tools.
I use a 3rd party data analysis tool on Infusionsoft, and regardless, I do recommend you have multiple measuring systems in place, but it is nice to have one already established.
Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft. I know it seems lopsided, but the fact is Infusionsoft is a larger company with more capabilities. Ontraport has some great features as well but for many users the functionality may not be enough.
Ontraport is newer and is continually learning from their progress. It’s great. I love what they’re doing and they have a good program, but they are competing with a better, more established, even cheaper alternative. It just doesn’t stack up right now.
Infusionsoft has more features that focus on more solidified business practices, which is why they’ve been growing so rapidly for years. In fact, they received $54 million in venture capital funding in 2013, and they’re only expected to continue to flourish.
Their focus on CRM, Sales, and Campaign Planning are the reasons Infusionsoft holds such a solid presence in the marketing software marketplace.
I would continue to recommend Infusionsoft for most business structures, especially ones that possess a strong sales angle and a physical product. For information marketing, solo-ventures, and consulting, I can see where Ontraport can provide some great tools. The problem is scalability, where Ontraport is limited to its basic functions, while Infusionsoft grows with the user as their business grows and changes.
But my opinion isn’t the only one worth listening to – what are some of your experiences with these two pieces of software? What are some key selling points? What do you like or dislike? We love to hear your ideas on the analyses we do here.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Ontraport-vs.-Infusionsoft_0.jpg600600Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-11 09:30:212015-12-15 11:10:48Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft: Which Marketing Software is Right For Your Business
The first thing you’ll notice about Adam is his charming accent.
The second is how well-versed he is in digital marketing strategy. Adam generously shares his strategies, and how they have helped him turn his company into a multi-million dollar marketing agency. Learn how he and Toby Jenkins got their company started, and they strategies they use now to attract clients to come to them – clients who are willing to pay big money to hear their advice.
Listen now and you’ll hear Adam and I talk about:
(03:10) Introductions
(09:00) The first phone call Adam has with a prospective client
(16:00) How often are prospects asking for a discount?
(18:00) Adam’s content strategy
(24:30) Which content has converted the best?
(33:00) What kind/size of companies is Bluewire Media targeting now?
(36:00) What is Adam doing to attract clients that are willing to pay $7,000/day?
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.
Adam Franklin is a social media speaker and marketing manager of Bluewire Media – the web strategy consulting firm he co-founded in 2005 with school mate Toby Jenkins. Adam is a social media commentator on 2UE and writes for two of the Top 25 Business Blogs in Australia (Startup Smart and Bluewire Media).
He lives and breathes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and email marketing. Adam co-created the Web Strategy Planning Template and co-wrote the e-book Web Strategy Secrets which have been downloaded by thousands of people worldwide. Adam has been featured on Smart Company’s Hot 30 Under 30 and the Dynamic Business 2010 Young Guns lists of young entrepreneurs, as well as in the latest edition of David Meerman Scott’s book “The New Rules of Marketing & PR.”
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Adam.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-11 06:00:432020-09-11 06:56:57Adam Franklin on How BlueWire Media Attracts Clients that Pay $4,000 Per Day for Advice
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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.
Cathy Moran opened her own law firm the day after she was admitted to the California bar. She’s practiced bankruptcy law in the Silicon Valley of California for 32 years, representing debtors, creditors, and trustees. She is certified as a specialist in Bankruptcy Law by the Board of Legal Specialization, State Bar of California and has particular interest in the intersection of bankruptcy law and the fields of family law and tax.
rospect
Last week, I left a voice mail for each of the three. One never called back, so they are no longer a prospect and are now ‘demoted’ to ‘suspect’ again and will continue to receive an email per week that is educational in nature.
The first lead magnet is a free report will serve our first inbound marketing campaign, which will consists of 8 blog posts published at a rate of two per week over a 30 day period.
